My father was a great doctor, and my older brother became a great doctor, too. I stood out in my family for being the only one who was not great.
The one thing my father said to me whenever we met was, “Don’t embarrass me.” It was such a constant refrain that I hardly ever heard him say anything else.
I was continually compared to my great brother. For all intents and purposes, he acted as though I didn’t exist. He avoided and ignored me whenever he could.
My friends teased me about whether the two of us were actually related. My brother probably avoided me because it made him angry to be the subject of their mocking.
And my friends generally avoided me too, not wanting to be thought stupid if they were associated with me in any way. They only came by when they felt like telling jokes at my expense. In fact, I realize now that they probably weren’t my friends. I was the only one who thought they were.
There was no place for me back there. Nothing changed, whether I was present or absent. In short, I was completely insignificant. It’s not such an uncommon situation.
But while this might be just the same boring old story, the kind that could take place in any world, real or made-up, that didn’t change the fact that I was the protagonist of the boring old story. If that’s what I had to work with, then it was up to me to live true to my feelings and be what I wanted to be.
Life back home was a repetition of the same old thing, every single day. Over time, I began to feel this foolish sense, faint at first but growing stronger by the day, that I wasn’t actually the real me. But I wanted to be the true me. I wanted to live my true life. And as I grappled with the emptiness of my life, I just so happened to come across Brag Men.
When I read it, the brilliant vividness of the sea came alive for me. It was as shocking as if I had learned that my life had no color, that the real color was over the sea.
In that moment, I realized that I was my real self. That this life was the one that counted, the only one I had. And once that was clear, I knew I had to go all-out.
I had to live my life to its fullest, and keep moving onward like death itself was at my heels. If I fell, I would swim through sewer water to get back on my feet again. And the thing I needed to make all of this work was the mask.
I needed the mask to be myself.
✦ ✦ ✦
“I dunno if I’d call that logical. I think a man ought to be bold, show his face and be known for it, y’know? I can’t imagine doing it any other way,” Ace said.
I came back to my senses after my reverie about the past. It felt like so long ago that I’d left my hometown.
“I don’t want to be a bountied man,” I explained. “I just want adventure. That’s all.”
“But still, you don’t have to go out of your way to hide your name and face, do you?”
“You wouldn’t understand. Where I come from, people were mocked for choosing the freedom of the sea. They treated pirates and criminals and adventurers all the same. If people discovered my family was related to a dropout, they’d throw stones at them in place of me.”
“Ah, I get it… Aha!” he said, his face lit up with understanding. “You love your family, don’tcha?”
“Huh?”
“You left your family and your hometown behind, and you don’t want to cause them any trouble, right?” Ace guessed.
“Of course I don’t love them!” I burst out. “I don’t love them at all. I hate them! That’s why I’m here!”
“Really? That’s weird. That wasn’t the hunch I had,” Ace said, frowning and running his hand through his shining black hair. “That can’t be true…”
In a sense, he was right. It shouldn’t be that way. But I couldn’t think of any other way to explain it.
“Speaking of family, I’ve got a little brother. Not related by blood, though,” Ace went on, looking toward the sea. “Real loud and wild, like a monkey. I didn’t think about it much when we were around each other, but now that I’m all alone, I’m surprised by how much I miss him.”
He chuckled to himself. So Ace’s family was one brother he wasn’t even related to by blood. And when he thought about him, he smiled.
I felt half-envious and half-annoyed with Ace. This far away from the place where I was born and raised, and I didn’t miss it even a little bit.
The two of us seemed to be about the same age. How did we turn out to be so different?