as always, he was
Its not the performative kind of the honesty learnt by watching public figures perform sincerity and then performing the performance. Sentiment three generations removed from anyone who truly felt it. And still I knew the shape. The way you recognize your own gait in a shop window before you recognize the tartan.
I know that trick. My father built a whole man out of it.
Toome to a valley of his aspirations, that was the run. Toomebridge on the Bann, out of the Irish low country and into somewhere he could be reinvented, the wannabe Scotsman who spent the larger part of his life being anything but where he was from. He tipped an imaginary fedora by the hum of a not-quite-invented generator, took the second road, maybe the third, friends and family and homeland be damned, and Lagos was his country X, X being the place you go to be reinvented. Always the alien, because of course. I have wondered if he felt leaving that eel filled riverbend the way I felt leaving Oakland. Whether pull is DNA. Whether tide feels off balance.
He made us an offer once. The callousness of it horrified both, her and me. The way you are horrified when you realize you are a chess piece, she will never be a wife and the hand above the board does not notice enough to care.
I did not accept the offer, of course. I accepted the premise. To run. To Colombia, or country X, with a her -- not that her, different her entirely. That is the inheritance nobody reads from the will. Not the hat. The premise.
I belong to the coast. Not a quiteño, not a cuencano, not a rolo, not a paisa, none of it. The Costeños know me on sight from my smile, whether they find me in South Carolina or in the sierra towns, Black Irish sorting itself from the Scots. Scotts Valley by happenstance, the surname a joke the map made. My people were the ones at the pool tables of any Oakland club, never the Scot Lairds of my father-in-law, whom I adored the way everyone did, freely and without the terror. I cannot dance a lick. The rhythm is still me. That is not a contradiction where I come from. It is a shoreline, water doing one thing while the sand does another.
And he a man capable of building anything save a relationship. To the end. Trite, and true, and the two do not cancel.
His demons terrified me chiefly because I thought they might mistake me for him and give chase. Same face. Same drift toward country X.
As always, he was.
So what do you make of honesty when it is inherited machinery, when the confession is real but the apparatus is borrowed from men who cadged it same as you. I don't know yet. Still at the window, admiring a kilt.