Niloufar Shidmehr's blog

Somebody Is Calling My Name

I don’t know the meaning of my name. But I know one thing: my name is entirely what I am. Already, I’ve forgotten the name that’s given to me. Maybe if I think harder, I’ll remember it. Yet I feel no urge to look for it: it was like all those things that must have been lost, those that must have been gone and set free in formlessness.
I shaped my new name on my own, though. First, it was simply an insignificant speck of pollen among thousands of other specks, drifting around in the air, searching for the pistil. I waved at that very spec and it floated toward me. “Just don’t forget to water me everyday,” it whispered.
In the beginning, I got confused when someone called me by my name. So much that I even wondered if anybody had called me at all. Was that really MY name? Or could there be someone else who was given that name? Perhaps I was neither that name nor the person behind it. Or, I might be both.
That’s why, once, upon return to myself, when I responded, “Yeah?” the person who’d called me suddenly hesitated and asked me, “Are you really yourself?”
Somehow, my new name sounded familiar to the people in the new place where I’d arrived at the end of a journey of self-discovery. And that was the primary reason for me to get used to that name. Unlike my given name, it didn’t provoke a bundle of interlocking questions whenever I spoke my name:
“Pardon me?”
“What did you say?”
“Can you spell it?”
“What does it mean?”
“I beg your pardon?”
“Can you repeat?”
“Hey, that’s beautiful.”
“Well…”
These questions always stunned me and made me feel threatened, for I came to live here free from the people who bombarded me with endless questions. And, as I said, this was the primary reason for getting used to my new name. Yet, I changed my new name countless times, as I found myself used to the boredom of having nothing to puzzle over. In essence, of course, all the names were, well, one: They only changed shape as wine does in different glasses, even glasses of the most contradictory cast.
Once, one of my classmates asked, “Do you know what your name means?”
I didn’t. I inquired why he asked that question.
“It’s pretty,” he answered. “In an ancient story I used to read as a child, it was the name of an intrepid and impulsive woman who had countless lovers. She gambled away their money.”
He looked me squarely in the eye, trying to pull the image of that mythic woman out of my gaze. All of a sudden I felt the image of that woman emerging from the deep, rippling through onto my skin. I turned my head coyly, tossing my hair gently from one shoulder to the other. Astounded, my classmate stepped back.
“That woman… drove her lovers insane… by just tossing her hair… from one shoulder to the other,” he stuttered in surprise.
Then, in a moment of silence and gloom, a soft breeze began to flow and touched my hair. I trembled and my hair floated in the wind. All of a sudden, a thousand dancing hands bloomed out of my shoulders and underarms and lifted me off the ground. My body glided smoothly; my feet moved like fins of a fish; my hair was set loose on a crest of air, unfolding wings and ascending passionately. Then, with millions of blazing, lithe specks that flew around me, I became a sun, rising above the threshold where he stood, astounded and impassioned.
Another day, a young man whom I’d seen a couple of times caught me off guard between two pillars of books in the library. “You know, I found out that your name’s historical,” he confessed. “There is a statue, with your name, that’s been standing at the threshold of an ancient tomb for thousand of years.”
I wait, standing there, perhaps for thousands of centuries, not for thousands of years, and certainly not for this very moment when I find myself listening to him. “It’s as if you’ve looked at me from beyond history,” he twitched.
Standing there, built of stone from head to toe. My eyes, the line of my cheek, even my hair are fixed in a still sketch. My lips are two rocks carved and sealed together. My hands are locked on to my chest. No breeze or wind, not even a storm can give my hair the slightest movement now, or set it free to scatter across my stone shoulders.
Whoever I may be, I know that now I’m the precise and perfect meaning of my name. One might say it is the name of a flower that grows out of the breast of a vestigial wall, as another might find it reminiscent of a cat stretching her body under the sun at noon.
Once again, somebody calls my name. Now, I have no doubt that the name I hear is the one that lives in me. It’s the one that bursts in the vagina of this moment and is attached to the umbilical cord of being, suspended between warmth and cold, question and answer, blood and color, freedom and slavery, as it spins restlessly, awaiting its new birth.