I think this is it.

 I've reworked this opening to where it's close enough to what I want to let me continue on.

----

So...I was leaving Houston.

Really leaving.

And to my surprise, that I was not jumping for joy at the thought of my departure was more than a little unsettling, for I truly despised this city and its hidden ways. 

Oh, I’d made a couple of good friends here. And a couple of enemies. Of a sort. I’d healed well-enough to try and build a new life...without ever actually being able to build one. How did my mate, Jeremy, call my situation? In limbo? No...a holding pattern; that’s it. As if awaiting notification that I could now land and get on with more than merely existing. 

I’d let the meaning of it pass me by, like so much else, because I really didn’t care enough to understand what he meant. But now I was undertaking a journey back to a home that was not my home, and that it was to happen on April Fools Day seemed too damned appropriate a comment on my life, as it currently stood. 

I am forever stained by abstract meanings being thrust upon me. Such as being labeled simple, meaning stupid, merely because I choose to keep to myself. Called ungrateful because I wanted to live in my own way and accept others on my own terms. I was even stained by my life beginning on Groundhog Day, an American tradition unheard of in the UK but still laid upon me thanks to my Aunt Mari. 

Saw his shadow as he was being born so ran back into his hole, and didn't come out till half-seven; that's why he loves the night. 

Merely proof of my mother’s claim that I was simple. 

Perhaps I am. For what am I doing but proving them right by choosing to travel on the Jokester’s day. The fates must be holding their sides, from laughter. 

 I'd wanted to go through Dublin. It would have been so much simpler. So much more direct. I could hop a train at Connolly Station, ride up through Belfast...if the tracks haven’t been blown up, again, by the IRA. But even a bus would have taken me straight into Derry. And had I been willing to fly a month earlier, there probably would have been no difficulty. 

Well, no difficulty but for the hunger strikes going on in the North of Ireland, with daily protests collapsing into riots a-plenty. Everyone I spoke with said to wait a little. See if it calms down enough to trust a train. Which it was beginning to do, according to the nightly news and two local papers. 

So I headed to the American Express in the Galleria to get the most updated information. My Aunt Mari had a friend who worked there and gave me solid advice. She also helped me make a plan for the trip to be a quick as possible, since my mother who was not my mother was riddled with cancer and could pass away any moment. She was so very sympathetic.

But not very much up on things. Because she mentioned there was a little music festival going on in Dublin and she was having trouble getting the ticket I wanted. The name of that little music festival?

Fucking Eurovision.

Being hosted in Dublin the first week of April. And the city had lost its goddamned mind. Flight costs were double. Hotels impossible to come by. Trains packed. Busses, too. Even hopping a ferry from Holyhead would be ridiculous, if I could even get there from Heathrow. 

That’s when I went to the British Airways office downtown to buy my ticket. They understood Eurovision and told me that if I wanted to be back in my city of birth that was no longer my city of birth before my mother was dead and buried, it was through Gatwick and Glasgow, I had to go. 

And hope my bag would follow. 

There was a certain disdain they shared about Gatwick. As for Glasgow? Enough said about that. They simply suggested I put extra clothes and my valuables in a backpack to carry on the plane. So very inspiring. 

But I suppose it is the perfect way to return to a home I could no longer call home. To see a mother, brothers and sister, who were not my mother, brothers and sister in an area of the world I was from, but wasn't. That I was born Brendan Kinsella meant nothing, now, for that was no longer me. And all who knew me in that town thought me dead, though I am not. How can one even think to make sense from such a situation? 

I've lived in Texas for more than eight years, and yet I haven't. I tried to rebuild a life that wasn't mine but belonged to some lad named Brennan McGabbhinn, of Letterkenny in the Republic. A lad who'd died as an infant but was now brought back into this world through me, like Lazarus. 

I’d compare my situation to that of Jesus and his resurrection but I’m still too Catholic. 

So that is who I was, even though I wasn’t, for all my immigration papers were in that name. Meaning, the American government was satisfied that was my name. Those I'd met in this city all called me by that name, as did my cousins. In fact, the only proof I had that I am not the person who that name says I am is my memory...which, according to my medical history, is really not to be trusted. 

Now, I can understand the willingness to accept me as someone I am not. It's simple. Easy. Uncomplicated. If that's what it says on your visa, and your passport, and your Green Card, why cause trouble when none is at hand? And why would anyone believe a lad who might claim otherwise? Especially since he's simple. 

Of course, I have received indication that the British are not yet certain I am who I am not, despite there being no evidence to the contrary. I think that is due only to their own bureaucratic stubbornness. Somewhere, somehow they decided they need to speak with this Brendan Kinsella, alive or dead, about a bombing he was caught in, and naught can change their vague focus on that. 

So I can think of no way to reconcile all of this madness except to accept it as it is and I should do as I always have--as I pleased. Which has led me to both great difficulty and amazing joy. 

And intense sorrow.