I was 13 when my faith in Allah first collapsed. As a child, I had a kind of obsession with God, but after years of conditioning to believe that my burgeoning sexuality was an unredeemable sin, Allah had become a source of fervent terror.
Losing my faith left me with a yearning for a new cosmic connection to the world around me. So when I stumbled across a small aquatics shop in a suburban part of west London, its holographic glint seemingly beckoning me inside was utterly irresistible.
