These little snippets, scraps of pieces, of thoughts and feelings, scattered through books and articles and letters.
(As if someone lit a fuse, in the middle of a life, and cast its pieces to the four winds, to be assembled in dusty archives by trembling fingers, tears welling in eyes.)
That his fingers were long, and his smile beautiful, and his vocabulary better-endowed than to use the word “scum.” That he loved sailing, and music, and books, and walks by the Atlantic, and was skilled at building cut-stone fireplaces, the practicality of the work, the same hands that sought pulses and palpated chests and played the accordion and picked flowers for the one woman, the best woman. Hands skilled to hold a gun or sign documents in writing illegible.
That his eyes were hazel, and his hair fell over his forehead, and his smile was especially sweet when he could not hear, and he polished his glasses as a sign that it was time to leave, skipping down the stairs like schoolchildren escaping to freedom.
His pronouncements grave like diagnoses, his voice soft because to be hard cost him breath, cost him time, resolute to the point of pacifistic militancy.
The contemplative squint to find the perfect word, the little defiant nod, the self-editing and faint hesitancy, re-framing, re-phrasing, a slightly shifted narrative.
That he could be firm and stern and yet prevaricate, could change his mind and learn and adapt, beliefs tainted, cast aside to connections torn asunder, the discomfort in remembering that which was touched and known by others who would have no more to do, those he could have no more to do, the association festered and raw, wounds on the soul, in the heart of a man given to great feeling, great emotion, and hearts ruled by great emotion are easily shaken and re-aligned in betrayal and perceived betrayal and the grief of what might have been.
That he was all of these things and a bundle of contradictions and more, that he was a walking oxymoron, but never moronic.
And they discount him and what he was, on the grounds of inconsistency, of bitterness, of vindictiveness.
Not inconstant, but changing, damaged. Not bitter but hurt. Not vindictive, but outspoken.
A heart that could hold a city, hold an empire, hold a world.
And they would not see, because they could not let themselves think. And he could not fit a paradigm, or a mould, or be shaped to fit, because he just was.
(The most human of us all.)
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