My name is Names.
I was found alone in the middle of a tulip field, with a name tag naming me “Names.” I was told my body was so cold that my skin was blue. Later, when I was four, I was adopted by a woman who wasn’t ready to have a daughter and whom I never called mother. We grew up in a silent house. There, I found that silence brings thinking into the human mind, and that thinking takes you to weird places.
I was eighteen when I moved to Austria to study psychology, hoping I would learn something about myself. I learned nothing about myself, but learned everything about my three best friends, Archie, Kind, and Memory.
Every night during the last month before our graduation, my friends, their friends, and I gathered in Memory’s apartment to try to hold on to our adolescence. We were terrified. One week before the announced date, we gathered to watch the video of the first presentation the four of us ever did together. We were supposed to talk about world hunger, but got so drunk the night prior that we had to present wearing sunglasses. We failed, but we were by far the coolest. As we laughed about it, I looked at my face in that video and I didn’t recognize myself. I didn’t know who I was then, and I still didn’t know who I was at that moment. I always worried I wouldn’t be able to make friends, but those videos made all of my friends cry and hug me tenderly. Still, somehow, I felt like I didn’t belong with those friends who knew everything about my past, my present, and my future.
I didn’t know where my life was headed. I had spent the past year wishing for university to be over, just to be held as a coward the moment a date for graduation was announced. I was stuck in place as everyone fled away from me, because everyone somehow decided they were adults and that they could figure out how to get a job. Everyone except for Kind, who simply couldn’t find a job as an art major.
Kind, no pun intended, was a kind man. He was a year younger than the rest of us, and we always treated him as such. Even though he was a silent person, as silent as one can be, everyone could notice that his heart was filled with passion and emotion. He loved movies more than anything, and he was always somehow invested in one of those “we are getting married and having babies” type of relationships with some poor girl who would get her heart irremediably broken by his lack of direction towards life. He never worried about anything, which I admired to a degree. Everyone always came to him for advice, despite his age, and even though his advice always came down to “don’t worry,” he said it with such confidence and earnestness that you couldn’t help not to stop worrying.
“Are you having fun?” he asked me after I didn’t laugh when everyone else did. He had a comfortable soul; people always told him their deepest secrets and worries without even realizing it, and I was no different.
“I think?” I said bluntly as my voice cracked. “I don’t know, Kind. I feel like I flew away with the millions of tons of cigarette ash that we covered the campus with over these four years. I feel like I’m going to disappear.”
“You are not having fun,” he said.
© Diego Ballesteros 2024-04-30