Names

What's in a name?  A life?  A soul?

I've had so many over the years.  Anna, Margaret, Mary, Helen, Dorothy, Betty, Barbara, Mary, Susan, Lisa, Jennifer, Ashley.  Each sounded nice at the time.  Each wears thin after not too long.  Every 10 years or so, I switch to what seems to be a popular name at the time.  It's been so long, there have been so many names, that I don't even remember the one I was born with.  It could be Eve for all I know.

Years.  Hundreds and hundreds of years.  Sometimes I wonder why I go on.  Every 10 years, dying and being reborn.  Same face, subtle differences.  New town, but each place the same as before.  Nothing really changes.

I live because that's what you do.  That's what you do in this world.  You just live for as long as you can.  That's the rule.  So if I can live forever, why wouldn't I?

If I ever do die, no one will know who I really was, least of all me.

I don't have to be alone.  There are others like me.  I know that.  I could find them if I wanted to.  But I don't want to.  And I don't want to be found.

Once I thought it would be fun, changing my identity, becoming someone new.  Now I realize it's just a chore, and it doesn't really make you new.  Not at all.  You can try to take on a new personality, have a new outlook, think of it all as an act, a play, a game.  After the first hundred years or so, it gets old.

I used to try to love.  I used to even love mortals.  But then I realized I was jealous.  I was jealous of how they could grow up and grow old and move on.  If I told any of them what I was, they would want to be like me.  They would want to make them like me.  That is something I will never do again.

Andrew, James, Christian, Alexander.  They're long forgotten now.  Everyone of them dead and buried.  I remember their names.  I have no idea who I was at the time I knew them, but their memories live on with me stronger than the memories of myself.  Their names meant something.  Their names were their lives.  Their names came with souls.

My soul is gone.  I used to tell myself I still had it, buried somewhere inside me, but I know now that was just a lie, a story I told myself.  It was about as real as other people believe creatures like me to be.

It's funny how what's real changes with what you actually know.  I'm a fear, a fantasy, a fable to most.  I know that what's real to them can never be real to me, ever again.

The most real thing about me is the name I currently go by, and that can never last.

So why do I do it?  Why do I keep going on?  I wouldn't have to kill myself.  I could just show them, show the world, what I really am.  Someone would end me, whether someone like me or someone afraid of me.  Someone would put this all to an end.

Unless they are all too afraid.

They don't realize that I'm the one who is afraid; afraid that I will truly never die, that my names will go on forever.

Hannah, Sophia, Emma, blah, blah, blah.  Who knows what my name will be a hundred years from now.  Maybe I'll be back to Mary by then.  Whatever my name is, nothing will have changed, not really.  I'll still be alone, by choice.  I'll refuse to love, by choice.  I'll have a different name, by choice.  And my soul will still be gone, not by choice.

A name.  What's in a name?  It's nothing; it's everything.  It's the only thing I can control.  It's the only thing I have left.