syno-names

everyone is loud and is somehow next to me and i don’t know how to say things at the right time when people hear it. am i here, or am i just my friend’s shadow, a little ghost who is haunting the party with awkward silences and conversation gaps i don’t know how to fill? do you shake hands or hug when you meet? was his name kyle? no, not kyle. fuck. where’s the trash can? where’s the ashtray? where’s my purse?¹

someone spilled their drink on me so my sleeves reek of vodka. i’d forgotten what that smelled like. sterile and acidic and vaguely surgical. the windows are down and the city is flying by as the wind whips my hair around my face, a storm of ringlets and curls.

a boy i grew up with had a grandfather who was, in my mind, exactly what a grandparent should be: warm and funny and present and full of swear words and stories. he was a large man with a large past, you could tell just by looking at him.

i always thought he must’ve been a sailor, could picture him with one of those little sailor’s caps and a tattoo on his bicep, a heart, maybe, or else a pin-up girl. maybe he was a pirate. or a crooner. or some hybrid myth i made up because i loved him. whenever i saw him, he’d recite a poem to me, as though he’d written it on the spot, as though it was for and about me. longfellow wrote it, i learned, not skip. but it’s his, in my mind. and it’s mine, too:

There was a little girl,

who had a little curl,

right in the middle of her forehead.

When she was good,

she was very good indeed,

but when she was bad she was horrid.

i’ve been very good indeed lately, if i say so myself², but underneath all that goodness there’s this low, steady hum, this craving to be bad, to be feral, to smash plates instead of rinsing them, to scream instead of nodding politely, to let myself be ugly and furious and un-contained.

my friends and i have plans to run away, either to the forest or to the sea, where we’ll change our names and abandon our phones and run naked through whatever nature we can get our hands on. we’ll be “the witches down the road,” the kind kids whisper about past bedtime.

there’s something thrilling about imagining it, a life that isn’t ours but could be. it feels like in talking about it we are living it, even if only for a few seconds.

a spider the size of my eye³ has taken to hanging out on my front door. thought it was fake at first, some prank david pulled to get me back for all the times i’ve stuck a skeleton⁴ in his room or in the shower to surprise him, but no, the spider came on its own. a huntsman, i learned. not a threat to me, but not exactly pleasant either.

i moved him outside near the couch. i was trying to keep him safe. i kept thinking about alan and how he might see the spider as food and how i could maybe bargain with the universe a little by putting out extra cat food. as if care could be traded like currency.

alan died on christmas eve.

he turned up on our door bleeding and unable to walk. our neighbors found him there. they took him to the vet. he didn’t come back. my neighbor told me later like it was small news, like a package that never arrived. i burst into tears right there, my body reacting before my mind could catch up. the building feels quiet without his chirps. i miss the way his footsteps echoed as he made his way up the stairs, to my door.

now the spider feels different. less like a nuisance more like a witness. i notice how easily things vanish. how you can be careful and still lose what you love. how quickly a living presence becomes a space where something used to be.

some moments with alan

writing something new and needed to name a whole cast of characters before i began getting it all down. that’s what i told myself, anyway, but in truth i think it’s just an imaginary step i have convinced myself is vital in order to put off the actual writing for as long as humanly possible⁵.

i go on baby name sites and spend hours searching for the names of the people whose voices i hear so clearly. it’s easier when they’re based on real people. i look for syno-names—same essence, different letters. people have flavors. so do names.

i looked up my own. it means life. it also means bird and water and island. i like that i am all of those things. if you trace it far enough back it means voice or sound. three small letters carrying an entire ecosystem.

there was a saint ava, about a million years ago. patron saint of the blind. fitting, as i can’t see a thing without my glasses/contacts.

various interpretations of saint ava

someone played me a song the other day, “ava adore.” i’d never heard it before. closed my eyes and tried to imagine the ava who inspired it. her own ecosystem of island life and birds and water. in her he saw stars.

my parents almost named me sadie. i would’ve had a killer song if i was sadie. a little immortality in just five letters thanks to john, paul, george, and ringo.

sadie means ‘princess’. not meant to be. i’m too much to wear a crown, i think, too loud and sharp and soft and tangled up for coronations.

i am something else: a bird who is also an island who is also a noise. a tiny mythology of my own.

inside us all are two wolves...

the walls in my house are thin. i can hear my roommates through them, every laugh, every throat clear, every soft shuffle that tells me someone is heading toward the kitchen for a midnight snack. it should feel intrusive, but it feels like being held—like the world has a heartbeat and i happen to live right next to the artery.

sometimes it reminds me of childhood, those nights when my parents had dinner parties and i’d fall asleep to the muffled clatter of forks and the rise-and-fall hum of adult laughter. i remember feeling so safe then, tucked away while the people who loved me filled the house with noise and clinking glasses. now, when i close my door and crawl into bed, david’s laughter and alexia’s footsteps become that same lullaby, soft and steady and human.

i think about how wild it is that i once lived entire years without them, these two people who have somehow become coordinates on the map of who i am. i used to be shy around them, painfully aware of every gesture, every attempt at being “cool” as though coolness was a sweater i could shrug on if i tugged hard enough.

but somewhere along the way the performance cracked. the mask slipped. i laughed too loudly, cried too publicly, said something too honest, and instead of pulling back they leaned in. now i don’t try to impress them; i forget to. i forget to hide. i forget to protect the sharp and tender places. they’ve seen all the versions of me—the fragile one, the monstrous one, the hopeful one—and they’re still here, moving around the kitchen, talking through the walls, breathing on the other side of the drywall like the house itself is alive and saying: stay. stay. stay.

went to a gallery to look at toast the size of mattresses and a decaying raspberry the size of my car, crusted in gems like it was dressed up for a party. the gallery was on the same street as my old job at my old preschool. i hadn’t been there in a while, but my feet knew where to go. i wanted to touch everything, not to steal it or damage it, just to say hello with my hands. i tucked them into my pockets and rocked on my heels like a kid who’s been told not to touch.

when i was three, my mom took me to see andy warhol’s flowers. she loves to tell the story of how i waddled straight toward them, arm out, no fear, how she had to scoop me up before i could get my paws on warhol’s petals. twenty-three years later i’m on the same block, bigger but not different, still pulled toward color and scale and strange beauty, still itching to touch every pretty thing i see.

i’ve gone by a lot of names since then. some almost-names. some private ones. but they’re all syno-names, really—same girl, same reaching, just arranged differently.

1. it’s wild, all the thoughts that happen at once, in a fraction of a second, all so loud and so individual and yet totally the same in its ability to rattle around in my brain and make me feel like i am watching what is happening from outside of my body.

2. and i do, right now. i’m saying it.

3. which is to say, an extremely massive fucking spider

4. milton

5. and then of course after i name them i absolutely must create playlists for each and every character, as well as one larger playlist for the project/story itself. those are the rules.