A Name

I don't remember his name, I just remember that he had one. Some people's names make you feel nothing; they are just names, an assigned word to an identity that does not confirm or deny its existence. But other names make you feel electric. On just hearing it, a two maybe even one-syllable word, the whole world goes silent. Like a current racing through your bloodstream. Maybe it's a name you've heard a dozen times before, and it never meant anything. Yet, somehow, now you revert to that 6th-grade version of yourself who wrote a name over and over and over and over in your Lisa Frank notebook, hoping that by the 87th, 100th, 114th time the universe read it, that name would have also remembered yours. Maybe it's a name you thought would never matter, lost it the moment it bounced off your eardrums until somehow weeks, months, maybe even years later in a park on a cold night wrapped tightly in a warm sweater it became the most important word in the whole world. It changed from a name easily forgotten into one that would make you think twice for the remainder of your life. What power, in these little words we don't even pick ourselves. What power in this feeling that bubbles through your esophagus coating the syllables on your tongue when you cry out that name in passion, in sadness, in frustration, in elation. God, how I wish I could remember his name. His name that I spent so many days trying to forget in hopes that when I hear it again, I won't think twice. I won't hear sadness and joy and anger and hope and pain... I will just hear a word assigned to a person. Simple. Easy. Nothing but a dictionary definition and lazy biblical reference, classic and boring and limited. Wouldn't that be nice.