Hello, my name is:

“In the thick air it's like their voices come out of the air, flowing together and on in the sad, comforting tunes. When they cease it's like they hadn't gone away. It's like they had just disappeared into the air and when we moved we would loose them again out of the air around us, sad and comforting.” 

As I Lay Dying, by William Faulkner

A person’s name is supposedly the most important word to him or her. The Convention on the Rights of the Child states that a name is such an important right that every child is guaranteed one by law.

I know the sound of my name.

I know the brutal rhythm of my pen as it crushes and bruises d-a-n-i-etcetera onto the blue-veined paper of a notebook; I know how the shape of my inky electrocardiography records the heartbeats I cannot physically feel, those flickering palpitations that throw shadows on the chamber walls of my heart. My time passes in units called heartbeats: violence, triumph, and birds’ wings all crash together in my chest.

I know the meaning of my name: “God is my judge.”

I know that I was named after my father. Our names match down to the initials. I know that Danielle is derived from Daniel, that Biblical dream interpreter who read an angel’s handwriting on the wall and foretold the fall of a king.

Dreams are chemicals firing in the brain. I do not believe in angels. All kings fall, eventually.

So I know these things, but I know them as a girl who knows every word to her favorite song; she did not write the words. She cannot know what the song means to the singer, only what meaning she herself has shaped those words into.

I’ve read that infant dolphins name themselves by stringing a unique set of high-pitched whistles together. If I could, I would name myself by whistling music or laughing or by pressing my palms against your skin and letting my nerve endings tap out a signal to yours like Morris code.

I could never name myself as we do now. I am made of too many words.

____ says she likes my name—how the DAN strikes down like a sure step while the IELLE hangs in the air like Mona Lisa’s laughing smile. That’s you, ____ says. But I do not feel it belongs to me anymore than a snowflake belongs to the palm in which it slowly melts. Everything melts. Naming something is only an attempt to freeze and solidify something long enough to pretend at immortality. I as a sum am not immortal; only my parts—all those stars and dead planets humming in my skin—will continue on.

Sometimes when the moon pulls me to her, tugging me by my wave-white hands, I know that our feeble syllables—our Atlantics and Pacifics—can never name the water, that sixty percent of our bodies is that same timeless shushing that folds and falls, folds and falls into itself and swallows every footprint, every scrawled SOS on the sand. And sometimes when you call my name, I can feel dolphins butting at my ribs from the inside—reminding me I am not their kind, that although I did not choose my name, it is a thoughtful gift from another, something to be worn thin and weak-necked with love.

Still.

Speak my name, and I will hear it. But move toward me, reach for me, and I will feel it like your hands brushing against a wind chime, stirring the humid music hanging latent in my body.  

...


Dolphins name themselves.
Convention on the Rights of the Child