I remember asking this question in response to my mother’s question: why was I sitting silently on the stairs in the dark? I was haunted by an image of the atlas and my child-sized form hovering over the ocean, because I was not from here nor there, as reminded on an almost daily basis by the white kids in my school and neighbourhood.

I don’t remember what my mum said in response, probably the well-intentioned dismissal common from migrant parents facing issues in their children they had no framework for working through. I don’t even remember the inciting incident; in truth all the racism experienced in my youth is efficiently crystallised into two or three specific incidents seared on my brain for eternity. But I remember that feeling, that three dimensional horror that one day someone would come and eject me from the only country I had ever known and I would be separated from my family and have nowhere to go.