This town is trying my patience, and it’s not like I have much of that to start with. Who knows what made me this way. I guess my background is pretty much a bundle of frustrations. I’m an islander, supposedly, like the grandmother I mostly know from photos. I’ve always lived here, far from the world, a world that reaches us through the docks or the airport, or appears in mouldy books that crumble when you open them, coming apart one letter at a time, because they don’t mean anything when you read them here.

We’re all overshadowed by a loneliness that lives in the colours of our skin. I look into the eyes of everyone I see. That’s what I do on my fifteen-minute walk to school on the days we don’t stop by Rock Hole, which is empty at that hour. I prefer the path along the beach and the detour towards the mosque, where a herd of unfamiliar beings makes its way down the street. My father says they look like pheasants. I search the Arabs’ eyes; my surname reveals our shared origins. I look at their eyebrows, dark and dense like mine, beside window displays of fans, rugs and plastic knick-knacks, of sun-faded boxes, or perfume shops with French names. And I peer into the natives’ eyes for clues about my spongy hair, broad jaw and square feet. But there’s no black blood in my family, they insist. There’s blue in my eyes like the sea at dusk, contained by a desert-yellow circle.

My parents were mainlanders, both brought here by opportunity. My dad’s mother was an islander, though, and that’s why I’m Raizal, although I don’t think she ever described herself this way. The bit about looking into people’s eyes – it was an obsession, a compulsion to compare myself with everything. I never understood, and I still don’t, what it means to be so different from other Raizals. Only now, hearing that locals have burned their citizenship documents in protest, have I started wondering again.

Fortunately, these are my very last thoughts from the island. My dream of leaving will come true in less than a year. Where will I go? Far from this place where I’m defined by other people’s names, where all hiding spots are either predictable or unreachable. I close my eyes and see mountains, long open roads, I’m travelling towards a finite horizon, and in the distance I’ll see what they call a savannah, a town, then another, moving forwards, because moving forwards must mean you never return to the same place.