“So ‘Srithnam’ is your married name,” he said. 

We were walking back from the bar, and he was smoking a cigarette. I cannot remember anymore exactly how I wound up in that particular bar talking to that particular guy, or why I decided to take a walk with him. Maybe I met him online and made a date with him, although I haven’t really done that so much. Maybe I was with some friends in that bar, and the guy talked to us, and my friends left and I stayed. I just cannot remember. I’m sure if I tried really hard, if I researched the question, if I asked people, I could figure out how it was that I wound up walking on the street with this guy from the bar, who was smoking a cigarette but didn’t offer me one. I think his name was Bill, but I am not sure now. He was like ten years older than me; I realized that only when we were walking on the sidewalk under the streetlights and the moonlight, since the dimness inside the bar had made him look younger. 

But how we met isn’t important to this story (or anecdote, really), what’s important is that after a little conversation, he said with some apparent disapproval that “Srithnam” was my “married name.”

“Well,” I said, gently disagreeing, “I would suggest that ‘Srithnam’ is actually just my name.”

“But it was not your name before.”

“And it is my name now. I am not married now, and it is my name. So it’s not really my ‘married name.’ It is just my name.”

“I just think it is interesting that you would keep the name of the man who left you,” he said. 

“I am not keeping ‘his name.’ It is my name. He does not own the name.”

“But it is his name. And he left you. Why don’t you hate the name? Why do you hang onto it?” 

“When he left me, a cat that I loved was still in the apartment. He left the cat behind. It is now my cat. He is gone, he left the cat behind, I still love the cat.” 

“You told me, just a few minutes ago, that this really shocked and traumatized you. His leaving you. Why not go back to your unmarried name?”

“I am a different person now,” I said. “This is the name of the person I am now.”

“So aren’t you letting the trauma define you?”

“No,” I said. “I am just acknowledging that I am different now, I am changed. This is the word for the person I am. Like, when a tadpole becomes a frog. Now it is a frog. That is the word for it.”

“But a tadpole doesn’t become a frog because someone hurt it. It becomes a frog because it’s grown up.” 

“Like, maybe,” I mused, “when you were little, your parents called you Billy. Then to get along with your friends, or a girl you had a crush on, you started telling people that your name was Bill. Now that is your name. If you lost touch with those friends, or that girl never let you kiss her, you won’t run back to your mommy and take that name back and put your diapers back on. You’re Bill now. You’re different now.”

“Well, if any of that shit had happened, you might have a point.” He paused. “So you are letting a man define you, then?”

“I am letting my feelings define me,” I said. “ ‘Srithnam’ is the word that means ‘me.’ I love him, and that changed who I am, and now that is who I am. I’m not willing to give him the power to make me change back to something else. He doesn’t have that right, does he?”

He stopped walking and took a big drag on his cigarette, reminding me again that he had not offered me one. He seemed to be considering what I had said while the cigarette smoke settled into his lungs. I thought about how that feels, the smoke in my lungs, and I felt angry that I didn’t have a cigarette and angry at him for not offering me one. I cannot tell you for certain why I felt like I had to justify myself to him. Maybe I wondered how many other people felt that way about me but had never told me. 

Finally he exhaled, and the smoke drifted away. 

“I don’t think,” he said, “that I could ever be with someone who lets herself be a doormat like that.” He tossed his cigarette on the sidewalk and stubbed it out with his sneaker. He shook my hand with a kind of grimace, and then he walked away. 

^^^

Kalyee Srithnam is a writer. This story is from her upcoming collection of novellas and shorts.

Image by Adina Voicu/Pixabay.