Nomenclature and Need and A Little Wonder

Ruminate.

I hate that word.

Makes me think of cows.

I'm on a roll, man, just letting things turn over and over in my head on the way to this journey, this completely crazy pilgrimage I'm making to places I've no good reason to come as a pilgrim to, since it's nothing so simple as prostration, nothing like a prayer.

Realized a couple other things today, the result, I think, of having been so stagnant of late, mentally, anyway; I haven't been digging deep enough. (Possibly that's why I haven't been writing as much...Huh.)

I always wonder about people like this: the kind who change their names, or at least begin introducing themselves as someone else, or who speak in accents, or suddenly begin fabricating pieces of their history. People who attempt to remove themselves from their own histories, somehow, as if that alone is the sum total of what it means to identify; as if with that self-imposed, false change they can somehow become someone else.

Nomenclature is self. An etymology. Maybe you weren't named after anyone. Does calling yourself by another name erase the past, truly giving you a new introduction to the world? What's in your head doesn't change, and if it does, it's insincere.

You are your history, and that is in fact what draws people to you, the interconnected lines of your self and your past and the name attached to all of it what they want to trace back to find you. I've always wondered what it meant to be nameless. I have had three names in my life, each of them a gift, each of them a marker of where I've been and what I've done:

Rupa, the name my Indian ayah gave me in the orphanage at first, until one of the Christian sisters said they wanted an English name to put in the adoption catalog.

Baby Helen, the catalog name, the one my parents picked from the pages of small faces, the one that stuck with me until I came to the US.

Michele. My mother's cousin. Its root is Michael, beloved of God. (Someone's God, anyway...). Other people have this name, sure. And yet because it is attached to me, it becomes mine, becomes the door behind which I stand, waiting to greet new people, to tell them stories and let them in.

Sometimes we exist in a negative space. What we aren't. Where we haven't been. What we don't and can't know. Once again I reference Travis.

Travis was so dejected on Monday... he had said something about his brother having a hard time, and then told me I was acting like I didn't care. It bothered me. I'm a pretty caring person, often to my own detriment, because I want to fix everything for everyone and prove to them that they can power through things, can survive too. He lay there just staring at the ceiling, listening to what he thought were sad songs, and looking blue, and I disappeared. Had to, under the weight of the emotions of someone I didn't really know, who was filling up the room with his inflated sorrow, with his air of having the weight of the world on his shoulders. I stayed out of sight for as long as I thought appropriate, for as long as it took me to muster the resolve to finally realize that to be lonely in such close proximity to another warm and present and understanding human being might be the worst feeling there is.

And I finally just hugged him and was like, "It's not that I don't care. But nothing I do or say can change what's happening to you, within you, and I don't know you well enough, and this is still your experience to carry. Not mine."

I cannot change your circumstances. I cannot make your brother happier, cannot take you to him, cannot change what is the inevitable and ever-looming outcome of whatever this situation is. It is not mine to change, or even to try.

It was almost as if he truly believed that by intervening, he could change the fact that his brother would feel some pain, would be betrayed (his girlfriend had threatened to break up with him), that no matter the energy I pushed out into the space between our bodies, this would happen. Neither of us can predict what it will be; nor can his brother, nor could the greatest clairvoyant on earth. This will happen, and this will pass, or linger, or hover for a while, and all of it is vital and irrevocably tied to who we are and why.

Was talking to one of my favorite-of-favorites earlier, Dani, who's well read and well traveled and bubbly and awesome. I subjected her to yet another version of one of these rants. But I've been thinking...

I want always to be ignorant. (And before, dear reader, you gasp in astonishment...) Let me tell you why.

The first time you ever witnessed a snowfall, in your memory stands out as complete immersion in whiteness. In cold. The first knowledge you'd ever encountered of a world stripped bare of green and growing things, its bud and blossom replaced by shining flowers of ice, with hills upon hills of cold crystalline hills that weren't there before, that would disappear, although that you didn't know until later.

The first taste of what would become your favorite food, whatever it is. Something rich or salty or sweet or tart and strange, that you couldn't get enough of for that moment, or in fact, forever, but that you'd never have guessed until you began to wake in the morning and move through the day just grasping at its essence and longing for one.

The first kiss. The first realization that two mouths are made just for this, this strange and sometimes frightening mix-up of lips and teeth and tongues, of breaths mingled as one like a tree and a strangler vine, neither one knowing any longer who feeds upon whom, often a fast and fleeting pain on stepping away, as if a quick splinter has broken off, found its way into the heart.

Who but the ignorant are open to the experience of something in itself as wholly and terrifyingly and liberatingly new?

BE FALLIBLE.

Be vulnerable. Be confused and mystified and yes, be ignorant. Be a child in all the ways that children are innocent of themselves as full of ego. Make mistakes, for god's sake, make mistakes. Break things. Cry. Put them back together. Laugh about it.

I'm listening to this damn song by Manchester Orchestra, and it's not the most inspired thing, for sure, but that's the other thing, man: I am proud, yes almighty, I am PROUD of all these things in me that are mundane, that are commonplace and full of sameness, the sameness that comes with knowing someone else somewhere finds these things entertaining or exciting or worthwhile. For who, in all their difference, has ever refused entirely to fall back on a guilty pleasure or a common ground when faced with the utter awkwardness of meeting new people?

Bad reality TV. T Shirts in Brand Name X, the same ones in the same color and cut, every time. Snickers Bars. Plain Chap stick. That fucking obnoxious Garth Brooks song about friends in low places.

It comes on and everyone begins to sing and no one looks at anyone like they've just crawled out from under a rock, and the beers are still flowing and the whole place lights up with, yes ladies and gentleman, sameness. The sameness that draws us all out onto the dance floor to lock arms and stomp and throw our heads back, regardless of what the guy next to us is wearing, or how he ranted on about the Cubs game just 5 minutes ago. The sameness that tells us it's totally chill to strike up a conversation with the girls behind us in line about the sale the other day, and how hot it is, and how down the street there's a great thrift store that sells dresses. The sameness that buoys us up in a foreign place when, forgive us one and all, we see something written in English, and beneath that a crowd with smiles on each face.

BE MUNDANE. Let it connect you to that dude in the coffee shop, or that girl you keep seeing in the elevator at work, or the couple sitting next to you at dinner. Let sameness and mundanity and silly lacks of idiom bolster your courage until soon you're chatting it up with everyone you see and eating with your fingers and bellowing the words to some song you thought you didn't know.

If you choose to live your life as an enigma, when will you ever become beautifully and seamlessly a part of your surroundings? You cannot drown yourself in human experience when all you do is set yourself apart.

...and just like that I've up and written another novel about nothing at all, and I'm drinking green tea and eating Good N Plentys and practicing my bad French so I can learn to disappear. It tastes like tree bark and sugar cane and Ouzo and there's nothin' else going on in my head but beach and sunlight and water.