If my old friends and new friends share but one thing in common, it is their unease with just how very little they do know about me.  I remember Brice*, my Welsh friend of fifteen years or so.  About six years ago, I stayed at his summer house.  We were both drinking some deadly alcoholic brew from his collection and he was getting less and less sober. Another shot and he was leaning forward and pressing an unsteady index finger into my cheek. “Who are you really? So long… and I don’t know anything about you,” he’d intoned.

A year into my stay in Antigua, my landlady too made the same complaint.  At the time, I replied, a bit too curtly, that the current arrangement worked well for both of us, since our transactions were purely business and she was not required to know more than normal landladies do of tenants.  I’d regretted the words even while I was forming them. Sweet and lonely woman, she really did try her best to befriend me. Her face adopted a hurt look for a long minute.

I thought to apologize, but, was too taken aback by the intensity of the look on her face. I was even more taken aback when, in the next minute, the look was gone and she was appraising my lean “6’2” frame and wondering after the sorts of food I favoured.  To atone for my earlier words, I let it slip that I liked pie…cherry pie.  And, to show that I was truly penitent, I even held her to a promise to bring me some pie sometime. This satisfied her immensely and she, very quickly, forgot her curiousity, for the moment, to learn more about me.

The “About Me” issue doesn’t just rear its head in personal situations. I remember my first ever business conference on the island. All participants were handed a folder. In that folder was a registration sheet, which, the coordinator kept reminding us, during the opening ceremony, to complete. On this registration sheet were two sections. In the first, you were supposed to give the name of your organization. You were also expected to share some details on your organization. In the second, as a personal touch, I suppose, there was an “About Me” section for you to share some brief details about yourself- in some seven lines or so.

I accounted for myself and the organization relevant to this particular conference in the first section.  Then, I thought about managing a line or two in the second section, but, in the end left it blank.  I’d convinced myself that I moved to the Caribbean ‘just because’.  In the event that I was wrong and my Antiguan venture is really more than a “just because I can”, I wasn't too keen on attempting to pin down what I am or about.

*Name has been changed

 (V). Damien