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So I was finally leaving Houston.
Truly leaving.
And that I was not jumping for joy about it was more than little unsettling, for I truly despised this city and its hidden ways. Oh, I’d made a couple of good friends here. As well as some enemies. Ruined a couple lives--both deliberately and not--while making others better off-again, both deliberately and not. I’d tried to build a new life without ever actually trying to. It was an odd situation to be in, but everything about my life was odd, just then.
How did my mate, Jeremy, describe it? In limbo? No...no, a holding pattern; that was it. As if I were awaiting notification that I could now land and get on with more than merely existing.
Well...that notification had come, and I was undertaking a journey back to a home that was not my home to see my family that was not my family. If you want a fuller understanding of how ridiculous this all was, I was set to travel on April Fools Day.
Talk about too bloody appropriate a comment on my life--choosing to travel on the Jokester’s day. The fates must be holding their sides, from laughter.
My plan had been to go through Dublin. There, I could hop a train at Connolly Station and ride up through Belfast. Well...if the tracks hadn’t been blown up, again, by the IRA. But even a bus would have taken me straight from the airport into Derry. And had I been willing to travel on March 1st, there’d have been little difficulty.
But I chose not to because Bobby Sands’ hunger strike was to start up that same day, and knowing how people were in the North of Ireland it seemed best to avoid what would be daily protests that would then collapse into riots.
Aunt Mari’s friend at the Galleria office of American Express also said to wait till it calmed down. Which it was beginning to do, according to the nightly news and two local papers. She’d been most sympathetic over how my mother--who was not my mother--was riddled with cancer and could pass away at any moment, so promised to find a plan for the trip that would be as quick and easy as possible.
What she finally decided upon was flying into New York to change planes for Shannon, then a bus to Galway and changing to another bus to Derry, from there.
That was what she called quick and painless?
But then she explained it was the best she could do because of some stupid little music festival, in Dublin.
The name of that little music festival? Fucking Eurovision!
It was being hosted the first week of April, and the city had lost its goddamned mind. Flight costs were double. Decent hotels impossible to come by. Trains packed. Busses, too. The riots in Belfast and Derry were nothing compared to those rowdy crowds. Oh, had I timed my travel just right.
My mate, Everett, knew the owner of a travel agency, in Montrose, and that man understood Eurovision. He told me the simplest way to get back in my city of birth--that was no longer my city of birth--was through Gatwick then Glasgow, on British Caledonian, straight from Houston. Then I had to trust the fates my bag would follow. There was a certain disdain he offered about Gatwick. As for Glasgow? Enough said about that.
He simply suggested I put a change of clothes and any 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. How can one even think to make sense from such a situation?
Of course, it was best to enter the UK with as little fanfare as possible, for though I’d been born Brendan Kinsella, that was no longer me. All who’d known me in that town thought me dead, even though I am not...unless they didn’t or knew I wasn’t.
The life that wasn't mine...but now was...belonged to some lad named Brennan McGabbhinn. Of Letterkenny. In the Republic. A third or fourth cousin to myself, who'd died as an infant but was resurrected through me, like Lazarus.
So McGabbhinn was my name to the American government. Those I'd met in Houston all called me by that name, as did my cousins. That's what it said on my visa, and passport, and Green Card, and driving license, and health insurance, so why would anyone even begin to believe a lad who might claim otherwise? Because, in fact, the only proof I had that I am not the person who everyone says I am is my memory...which, according to my medical history, is really not to be trusted.
Naturally, the British are not yet convinced I am no longer of this earth, despite there being no evidence to the contrary. Their stubborn bureaucratic nonsense was keep alive their need to speak with this Brendan Kinsella about a bombing he was caught in, despite there being no evidence he was. And that need would not vanish, even if he’s dead.
I could think of no way to reconcile all of this madness except to accept it as it is and do as I always have--as I pleased.
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