➣ a k a n a m e .

[bigwig.]

➣ well. hello there.
this is just something that came to me, a spur-of-the-moment kind of idea that I really wanted to get out of my head. I don't know if I've ever posted any of my writing on cs, especially not good writing, but this is just kinda a stream of consciousness anyway.
it is told in second person - yeah, I know, what a hipster. all of this is pretty hipster-y. anyway, I don't really know how else to preface this so ??? enjoy it?

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➣ When there's no-one around to remind you of your name, you forget it.

When nobody ever says your name, or tells you your name, you cease to have one. And when they ask you, with wide eyes, in fear and indignation, what your name is and where you live, your body is shaking but you smile and try to tell them that you don't have either of those. And then they demand that that's not true, or they ask you why you're here, why you're out on their property rifling through their garbage, and you try to explain but you still don't know how to speak very well, so you probably end up telling them you want some blue vegetables or something instead.

And as soon as you can get away you're running again, as fast as your feet will take you. Away from them, away from all things that are theirs. You haven't had shoes for months and your feet are filthy and rough, but they hurt much less than when you first ran away.

There's not much out here. You're in the mountains. There's not a lot of people, not a lot of roads. But there are large properties, big houses that are surrounded by a lot of territory which is silently acknowledged as belonging to the owners of that big, old house. They have gardens full of flowers that smell nice, and very pretty trees. Or they just look like wild land, trees and grass and ground. There is no fence, no tea garden, nothing to mark that it is owned, but people know it somehow anyway.

Most of the people who live out here live on big properties like that. Or on farms that never end, that are just very, very long stretches of road and a lot of cows. Someone somewhere is in charge of all those cows, but you aren't going to go find out who or where they live.

It's cold at night. The stars are all glittering, and you think you remember someone saying something about shapes in the stars, but when you stare up at them, all you can see are a bunch of lights in the sky. Your eyelids are heavy, and you start to wonder who it is who's holding all those lanterns way up there, and how they got up there in the first place. You're tired, so you sit cross-legged in the grass, still wearing the big coat you brought with you when you still left. But you can't sleep yet. You can't sleep at night.

You're following a dirt road now, knowing that the last people you tried to explain yourself to won't follow you. Maybe it's because She was right about adults in the outside. Or maybe it's because they didn't understand a word you said. Either way is possible. After all, She was right about a lot of things. But hopefully not everything.

You get up and start walking again. You begin to hope, maybe, that you will find someone out here. Someone like that nice woman in pale pink who smelled like flowers and offered you water out of a bowl, and used a lot of words you didn't understand. She always sounded very excited, especially when she was talking to you, and she had a husband who mumbled a lot and was never nearly as excited as she was.

The woman in pink had a little stand on the side of the road, and she sold things to people who walked by or drove by. She gave you milk, and honey, and white rice, and very very juicy oranges and other fruits that weren't oranges but looked a lot like them, and you can't remember what they're called now. She always had fruit. She had oranges and plums and fruits you couldn't name, and when you bit into them juice would run down your chin. And she always smelled good. She always smelled like flowers.

She had smelled like flowers too, but not in the same way the fruit stand woman did. The fruit stand woman smelled like her clothes were just always full of flowers, like at any moment pale pink and white petals would come falling right out of her sleeves. She had smelled like flower petals soaked in oil, like someone who had never smelled a flower had tried to re-create the scent of flowers. It wasn't a good smell.

You wonder why it was you left the fruit stand woman. She'd been so excited about you, even though she'd beckoned you up to her stand like you were a cat and when she offered you the bowl of water out behind the fruit stand, you'd gotten down on your hands to drink it and she laughed. And then, like she was talking to a child, she'd asked you if you were pretending to be a cat, and you'd said that you didn't know about cats but you were good at pretending to be a dog, and you could do it whenever she wanted. And then she'd laughed again, but that laugh people make when they don't understand something and it frightens them slightly, and you'd wondered why it would have frightened her.

She'd asked you what your name was and you said you didn't have one. She'd said that thing, the "Oh, of course you have a name! Everyone has a name." thing. You'd said you didn't have one, again, or if you did you'd forgotten it, but they'd called you filth-licker even though that wasn't really a name. Even though She always called you filth-licker, it wasn't your name really, it was more like a label; you could call a cat by its name or you could just call it 'cat', or you could just call a dog 'dog', and calling you filth-licker was more like calling a cat by what it was.

Maybe She hadn't remembered your name either. If nobody remembers a name, does it really exist anymore?

[bigwig.]

➣ The fruit stand woman, the woman who always wore light pink clothes, was nice.

Or, she had been. She'd insisted that you stay there with her and her husband who mumbled a lot. She'd refused to call you filth-licker, she said that wasn't a very nice thing to call someone. She called you hope most of the time, but sometimes she called you cherry blossom or plum blossom, or sugar.

She'd spent the first couple days trying to fix your hair. She'd played with it a lot at first, running her fingers through it, picking up pieces and examining them. And each time you'd braced yourself for her to pull it but she hadn't. She'd said a lot of things about your hair, while she pulled it apart with her fingers and soaked it in water and tried desperately to brush it. She kept saying one word you hadn't understood, and now you can't remember it, something that started with an m. Her husband had muttered that she should just cut your hair, but she'd been indignant and said, "There's no way I'm going to cut off all of his pretty hair!" Which was strange, because you'd never thought your hair was pretty.

She would put out a dusty blanket for you next to her stand during the day, and she let you eat honey and milk and white rice and all kinds of very fresh fruit, and sometimes she made milk tea and the first time you ever drank it you burned your tongue but it didn't matter because it was so good. People who came up to the stand were curious about you, and you would watch them with inquisitive eyes. You relaxed in the white sunlight and when it got too warm the woman who smelled like flowers would set up a tarp or a paper umbrella for you, and make sure you had cold water.

There were many strange people who came up to the fruit stand. Some of them were like the flower-scented woman and her husband, with weathered faces and kind, tired smiles, who smelled like animals or like fruit or flowers. Others were strange, smooth-skinned and high-faced, dressed in tight clothes. They always reminded you of Her, the way she dressed, the way she smelled, and the way she spoke: quickly, harshly, succinctly. There was one man with dark hair who was speaking to a cell phone most of the time he was there, while his daughter giggled and picked over oranges. The outfit he'd been wearing had looked so much like a dress She loved to wear that you'd gone up and tugged on his sleeve, and he'd looked at you in surprise.

The woman in light pink had apologized for you without asking. And then you'd been confined to the space behind the stand for a little while. She apologized for you a lot, like when you'd told that little girl you were good at pretending to be a dog, and she'd asked you to do it, and you'd gotten down on all fours and barked and she'd petted your hair and tried to sit on your back. The fruit stand woman had apologized to that girl's parents, and you still weren't quite sure why.

There was another time when a different child had come up to you, and you hadn't been wearing your shirt, the fruit stand lady had insisted that she wash it right then. The child was very little, and looked at you very confusedly, almost frightened by the way your chest pulled in so sharply when you exhaled. The child had reached out a little, uncertain hand, and laid it on your ribs. They scrunched up their face like they were angry at something, and with their struggling mind and limited ability to use language they tried to form the question they wanted to ask, but what they ended up asking was, "Why are your bones so close to your skin?"

In that moment you'd understood that little child more than you'd ever understood anything. You felt, deep within your fluttering heart, a connection, a bond of empathy. This child was fighting a battle against their own limited knowledge of linguistics. It was like waking sleep paralysis, knowing on a primeval level what you wanted to convey but not possessing the grasp of vocabulary and structure needed to convey it properly. You did that a lot. There were times when even the woman who smelled like flowers only pretended to understand what you were saying.

She corrected you sometimes, or she got what you were trying to say and explained it to you, or told you the name of what it was you were trying to tell her about. You learned from the fruit stand woman. You thought maybe, maybe some day you would be speaking proper all the time instead of just spouting off mostly broken, formless sentences and disconnected phrases trying to say what you wanted to say. She had never corrected you. She used to mimic the way you spoke, but not like you mimicked the way the fruit stand woman and her customers spoke. When She mimicked the way you spoke, she smiled that smile that seemed to split her face clear open, where she tilted her head up and then angled her eyes down. She pointed her clawed fingers at you and spoke like you and then laughed at it. She mocked the way you spoke.

Why did you leave?

Why did you leave the quiet roadside, the noisy nights out in the country, the soft swaying of grasses in the wind? No, you hadn't left that. You were still out in the countryside. Just not with the woman who smelled like she was made of flowers and her husband who mumbled and was always tired. So why had you left them?

Probably because you were scared.

[bigwig.]

➣ She had told you about spirits.

When you were confined to the little room in the back corner of her big house, where when it rained hard a little stream of rainwater would come from the bottom corner of the window that was so high up you could barely reach it. If you were thirsty enough, you would drink from it sometimes. That was where you stayed. She never let you sleep in the big bedroom with the pink sheets, which you knew was her room because it smelled like greasy flowers just like she did, and also like that stuff She rubbed on her face, which you thought was called makeup.

She hardly ever let you out of the room. Only to clean Her house, which She said was the only thing you were good at. She told you that you couldn't leave, not now not never and She kept you inside the house almost all the time. She told you about the outside world, about spirits. She said that if you ever got out and into a place where there were a lot of people, to always avoid children and almost always avoid old people. She said adults would ignore you, because they only ever saw what they wanted to see, and they refused to see things like you. Sometimes She switched up her story and said that you were the spirit, and adults couldn't see spirits, which was why when her friends came over and they all congregated in the big living room where you had to clean the fireplace they all acted like they couldn't see you.

She said that children could see you, and so could animals, because they saw everything and not just what they chose to see, and sometimes when people got old enough they regained that power and so some old people could probably see you too. No matter whether you or other people were the spirits in Her stories, the things they did to you were about the same. They would trick you, you see, lure you into their houses and then lock you in there forever. You always wondered if that made Her a spirit, since she had essentially trapped you in her own house. But you never asked.

She said people who were nice to you were probably just trying to trick you, so they could catch you and keep you for themselves, because they could see what kind of spirit you were, just like She could, and you would always be the same kind of spirit so there was no use trying to change the way you were, just spend the rest of your life cleaning houses and drinking rainwater and being hungry all the time until you barely realized what hunger was anymore and having your hair be that word that you can't remember.

But how likely was it that the fruit stand woman had been one of those spirit hunters? She was nice. She was kind. She'd given you food and sunlight and a soft place to rest even though you refused to actually stand inside her stand because it was too close to a building and you were still worried that if someone closed you in a building that you would be stuck there forever.

You'd already broken free of one master. One night. She had gotten a new coat. She had been showing it off to the people she said were her friends but who you heard yelling back and forth with her a lot. That night you had chosen to steal it. It was big, too big for you, like all the clothes you wore, but unlike those clothes it was clean and not ratty.

You'd felt warmer in it than you ever had in your life. So you'd zipped it up and you'd run off into the night, out the back door which wasn't locked, without even so much as shoes on your feet. You'd run out of breath quickly. You'd underestimated how weak your lungs were, how much your feet would hurt, and how cold it really was outside at night. And perhaps more importantly, you'd underestimated how big the world is.

When most of your world is that little gray room where the window leaks when it rains hard and you sleep on the floor on a blanket that hardly ever gets washed and it always smells like dust because you never have enough energy to clean your room after you've cleaned the rest of the house, it's easy to underestimate how much world there is in the world.

[bigwig.]

➣ It is morning again.

You spent too long remembering the woman at the fruit stand who smelled like flowers and how things were when you were a ghost in Her house, and you fell asleep on the grass, even though you told yourself you'd never sleep at night because it's too dangerous. But now the sun is out, and you decide to keep moving.

You're not going anywhere. You're just ranging aimlessly over miles of ground out in the countryside, stealing food from roadside stands and rich people's outdoor garbage cans. Sometimes you think about going back to Her. But you couldn't even if you wanted to. You have no idea how to get there or how you got here. Sometimes you think about going back to the nice woman who smelled like flowers. But you have no idea how you'd get back to her. You could follow these old dirt roads, and maybe you'd run into a roadside stand that sold fruit and flowers and sandals that someone's husband spent all day making out behind the stand. But it probably wouldn't be hers.

By afternoon, you've exhausted yourself thinking about it. Your chest hearts from breathing hard and you feel sad because you miss watching blooming boughs sway in the wind from a blanket beside a fruit stand, or even the comforting sound of rainwater trickling from that weak spot at the corner of the window in the gray room. But you've come upon a something, a small building, out in what looks like a property that actually belongs to someone.

It's a standalone bathroom, and how fascinating it is to think that these people own so much land that they need to put a separate bathroom all the way out here because it's really that far from their house. As you come upon it, there is a young girl in front of it. You're not sure how old, you're bad with numbers and bad with ages. She's older than the girl who asked you to be a dog on that day in front of the fruit stand.

The girl looks scared. She stands still, shaking a little, and then reaches up a trembling hand to point at you. She asks if you are a filth-licker. You smile at her, actually smile, and tell her yes. She shakes again and then turns and takes off down the path through the garden. You try to follow her, but she is very fast and is out of your view quickly.

Undeterred, you wander through the garden. Somewhere out there, there is also an old man. He is wearing glasses, and he has a gentle smile. When he sees you, he asks, "Where did you come from?" and you answer with, "I don't know." The old man laughs, but not like She laughed when she mimicked the way you spoke. He laughs a small, deep chuckle, and nods slowly. He understands somehow.

He asks for you to follow him. You do so, and he leads you back to a house, where outside the girl from earlier is frantically trying to explain to some adults something about a spirit, something about a filth-licker. When she sees you, her eyes widen and she gestures to you, and vibrantly accuses you of being a filth-licker.

The old man explains, "I found a lost child." The adults look at you. They can see you, like the fruit stand woman. Maybe because a child and an old man pointed you out to them, or maybe they are not the spirits or spirit captors or whatever She tried to warn you about. They ask you what is your name, and you say you don't have one but they can call you filth-licker if they want. They ask you where you are from, and how old are you, and you say, "I don't know."

They offer you food. They offer you a bath, which you think is what the fruit stand woman tried to get you to do that one time that involved all the water and reminded you of washing dishes at Her house. The old man offers you tea. You accept what they offer, but you say you don't want to go into their house. They ask why, and you try to explain but you don't think they understand. But they let you stay outside anyway, and you have tea and a little bit of food with the old man and some of the adults, and a girl who is in-between being a child and an adult who has braided hair and wears very large glasses.

You try to remember how the fruit stand woman tried to re-teach you to speak, but sometimes these strangers still don't understand what you say. You let it happen. They understand sometimes. You say you don't want to come inside to sleep, and you insist, so some of the adults bring out a few blankets and let you sleep in a sheltered spot which is still outside. The girl with the large glasses says she has a dog who is very brave, and she'll let the dog stay with you outside so you'll be safe all the night.

The old man comes to check on you. He doesn't know how lightly you sleep, and you don't pretend to stay asleep when you hear him approach. When you wake up, the dog is there, and it lifts its head too. The girl with the large glasses has also snuck outside, but she is fast asleep, curled up with a blanket she stole from her bed. She also brought out a flashlight and some magazines.

One is left open. You pull it close and start flipping through it, just looking at all the colorful pictures. Most of them are just of people, people wearing very nice clothes and a lot of that makeup stuff that She used to wear. There are words all over it, but you can't read them. The old man chuckles at you. He can tell that you can't read.

When you wake the girl with the glasses up as the sun is coming up, you ask her to show you what some of the words mean. You recognize some of them when she reads them aloud, but others you don't know at all. When she first says them, you repeat them immediately. They all sound so pretty when you don't know what they are.

Maybe, you think, maybe even filth-licker sounds pretty to someone who doesn't know what it means,

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➣ sooo that was the thing. you can post on this thread now if you want, maybe tell me what you thought about it a little? or not, really, it's your choice.

thanks for reading!! ~ izzy.