Last week I met up with a girl I hadn’t seen since I was fifteen. Thirty-three years ago. It’s an incredible thing to look into someone’s face that you last saw when you both had braces and used to roll up your school skirts. It’s quite a vulnerable thing, really. We met for a quick coffee and were still talking three hours later. We made a firm date to meet again and to add some wine into the mix next time.

Our modern world doesn’t like complexity. We are told to pick sides, to declare what is right and what is wrong, who is worthy and who is not. Black or white. Left or right. Sacred or secular. Yes or no.

But life doesn’t really work that way.

When I first arrived in Barbados twenty years ago, I didn’t think of myself as an immigrant. I thought of myself as someone who had bought a house in the sunshine, with rum-tinted glasses firmly on, and a vague idea that this might be a nice place to raise a family. The word immigrant wasn’t one I claimed — not then, not for years.

Lately, I’ve been carrying around this strange sensation — like sunburn, but not. That itchy, raw, overexposed feeling that doesn’t come from lying out too long without SPF, but from life.

I woke up the other morning to an email that landed like a stone in my stomach. Not life-altering, not catastrophic, but quietly deflating. One of those disappointments that feels heavier than it should, mostly because of what it stirs up underneath.

It sat with me while I made coffee, while I packed my bag, even as I rolled out my mat to teach. That familiar lump in the chest. The urge to overreact, or to shut down completely.