Naming Rights by Angela Townsend

 

Image | Khabbab Abdelmaqsoud

Naming Rights

We all still expect to hear our names called.

Few say this, even undercover. Fewer still say “here I am!” after the age of leg hair. But this is a dream that can’t be taken, not even by one’s own reasonable hands. 

We have names, like indoor cats and botanical discoveries. We have names, like visible nebulae and cartoon characters. We have names, and this is a remarkable thing. 

We are not a mass of meteors known only by our belt. Proud astronomers have picked us out individually, and we can be spoken on the starfield. 

We can be called, and we will turn our heads before we give them permission. We can be written to, written up, written about. We have faces made of sound, totems made of letters. You can engrave us on your palm or wear us around your neck. 

We are not I Am, but we are more than we were. We are pronounceable. We all still believe we will be called by name.

I look up and see a loose bookshelf, curious why it leapt forth like a hip bone. Living alone, I seldom speak my own name, but I hear it. Does the very furniture rattle at the sound?

I look down and see my feet, long like skis and silly in their pawprint socks. Do they know what it means to carry a name across state lines, to follow the calling?

I look at dull documents and see incendiary material, the placid pyrotechnics of an old name turned new. Did each strike of the keyboard recall, muscle memory undaunted that I am no longer a maiden?

My name feels like a silver dollar in my hand. I never loved it before. I will never spend it again. I will take it for pancakes and write it birthday cards in longhand. 

I am infatuated with it today, shifting its weight in my lap like a warm weaned baby, powdered with the scent of ancestors. I stroke its vowels. I bubble bathe its consonants.

But my name makes me proud in the key of humility. To know you have a name, to know you still expect to hear it, is to suddenly hear every other name as a whole note of love. 

The cousin trying to enlist you in his plan to market all-natural nose hair extensions has a name.

The cashier ruing her day and assaulting your soft loaves has a name.

The assistant escaping all responsibility has a name.

We have already been called, loved into letters and considered with care. We are being called, day by doldrumming day, and what’s asked and what’s given are prone to sloppy kisses and arm wrestling matches. 

Grace has the stronger grip. We forget.

But then we glimpse lilac letters on the window, on the bookshelf, between the sleeping cats, between our own eyebrows. We hear rumors of our own name.

We can’t cease to remember. 

We can’t reason our way out of the most unreasonable expectation.

We have a call yet to come.

We will hear our name clearly for the first time. We will hear the arms behind the voice. We will hear the reason for each letter. We will rise.

Already and not yet, the letters sizzle. They are sparkler-scribbled in the sky, the promise of lasting light. They are the other world invading, the love that singles out crocuses and gerbils and cashiers and poets and every grieving gleaming being in earth’s late hour.

I want to call my neighbor with the courage of the named.

I want to linger over letters like sacred writ.

I want to be a signal flare of another world, where every name is a prayer, and every word is yes and amen.

The named are the loved. The call has come, is coming, and will come again.

© Angela Townsend

Angela Townsend

Angela Townsend writes for a cat sanctuary, where she bears witness to mercy for all beings. She is a five-time Pushcart Prize nominee and seven-time Best of the Net nominee. Her work appears or is forthcoming in Arts & Letters, Chautauqua, Pleiades, SmokeLong, and West Trade Review, among others.

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