My Name is Brian Richard Gaskill. When I was in High School…maybe junior year, I changed my name to Christopher Zoë. This was something that was born in creative writing class. It was a “pen name” I guess. Eventually though, I started to sign all my papers in all my classes this way. This practice didn’t go over too well, yet some of the teachers actually went along with it…for a little while.
The name Christopher Zoë had the meaning, as I read it in some baby name book, “whimsical and humorous with flight and freedom”. I was a moody son of a bitch who was terrified of people and living in general (I have only now almost 20 years later just started to change…I stress “just started”). The name was a goal. A goal of returning to the spirit that I just knew had to be inside me.
Later I found out Zoë is a feminine name…but I didn’t care. Besides when I Told my mother about the whole thing, she looked at me semi-shocked/confused/amazed, and went on to tell me that if I had been born a girl, she was going to name me Zoë.
I was Born Brian Richard Bernotas. Bernotas is a Lithuanian name. But since my father is half Sicilian and my mother is mostly Swedish, I usually leave the Lithuanian out when asked about my heritage. I suppose I enjoy the dramatic dichotomy of Sicilian/Swedish…the fire and passion mixed with the cold and lonely. Granted these are probably only cliché’s formed by my limited uninformed pop-culture attacked American mind...Still I think it represents me well…for better or worse.
When I was about seven years old, my parents divorced, both of them re-married, and my mother’s husband adopted me. I think because my father couldn’t afford to send child-support, though I have since been told it was more complicated than that (isn’t everything?). Anyway, then I was Brian Richard Gaskill. The weird part is, when you are adopted, they change your father’s name on your birth certificate…like your real, or first, or biological, or whatever father never was. But he was.
I saw him on every Sunday, and then eventually for full weekends, but only once, maybe twice a month. One day, on any given weekend, I was in the park with him playing basketball or softball or football…or any one of those sports that I gradually grew to not really care about (though for some reason I still LOVE sports movies), and he was standing about fifty feet away from me with his back to me. I wanted to get his attention. I was about to call out to him, when something happened. The word “Dad” just would not come out of my mouth. Eventually I just decided that I didn’t want to see him or his side of my family at all…I was about thirteen or fourteen, and it was all too much for me. By the way, I didn’t call my mother’s new husband “Dad” either. He told me I didn’t have to, so I didn’t. So, final tally? Two fathers…no dads.
By the way, my middle name? Richard? It comes from my biological father’s brother, who I think died after only being alive for a few months. I’m not sure what that has to do with anything…I just don’t like it. It can’t be good karma, assuming I believed in such a thing…which starting today I just might.
Look the thing is, I don’t really know who I am. I mean who really does? But anyway, my past, my name, the meaning of it all, the connections it all has…none of it is really helping.
I do know that for a few months, a long time ago, I was Christopher Zoe. I gave myself that name. I was knighted by a king that lived inside my own heart. This Knight was meant to go on many adventures and quests…searching for pleasures, and answers, and the inevitable pains…and so on. But instead he was told by the world around him, even by me, that he must hide away in my heart. He was told he was nothing but a figment of a weird boy’s imagination.
I’m not sure where this knight is today. I’m not sure I can travel far enough, or dig deep enough to find him, but I do know that’s what I should be doing. From this day on I will be searching for Christopher Zoë. He may even go by a different name by now, so I will have to remember to keep my heart open wider than my eyes on this quest
He May even travel by the name of “Donavan Mungo”…In honor of a lion that came to school with me my entire senior year. Most tried to tell me Donavan was a puppet…but I knew better. And I know in my heart that Christopher knows the truth too…for he had the heart of a lion.
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