“I met my dad for the first time when I was fifteen. I visited...

“I met my dad for the first time when I was fifteen. I visited him in Trinidad for two months during the summer. He met me at the airport and acted like he missed me more than anything else in the world. He ran up to me and lifted me in the air and started kissing me and saying how much he missed me. He carried all my luggage, and gave me money, and stopped by the supermarket on the way home to buy me all this food. He was introducing me to his friends like he was so proud of me. He’d say: ‘Look at my beautiful daughter,’ and things like that. It actually got me imagining how nice it would be to have a dad. Then at the end of the day, he dropped me off at my grandmother’s house, and I only saw him two or three times for the rest of the summer. The last night I was with him, he got really drunk, and he told me that I’d been a mistake. He was laughing when he said it, like it was a joke, and I should think it was funny. I pretended like it didn’t bother me, but it did. I thought: ‘So is that why you never wanted to visit or talk to me all these years?’”