There's Love in the Naming

Dwiveck Marie Custodio

image by Róża Kadi

Trust & Travel’s own Jade asked us all about our names at the start of our writing retreat’s first workshop. The question lingered in me and over the next few days, loose memories and the persistently but freely percolating thoughts they inspired all began holding hands. Eventually, they all looped together to craft the piece below.

“Yes, I’ll stick to Marie. Much easier,” they laugh and I laugh with them.

“Is that Puerto Rican?” they ask.

“That’s beautiful,” they say and I’m not sure if they mean it.

“That’s so unique!” they respond.

“How do you spell it?” they wonder.

“Oh, it’s not that hard,” they declare.

“No, but what do you want to be called?” They make me pause.

***

Sometimes, I do not know.

***

I am the response; middle names, shortened names, Yous are the calls.

I am from Puerto Rico and my name is not.

I am able to tell when my name is about to be called because the person with the clipboard hesitates, opens their mouth several times without releasing a single sound, has a panicked look across their face, eventually tentatively starts with my last name.

I am the one who got so used to her friends in the United States using a different inflection when saying her name that she herself, subconsciously, started using the new version whenever she introduced herself among English speakers.

I am the girl with the name her own family members often mispronounce. The girl with the name that created queues at El Mesón when she went on field trips as a child. The girl with the name that affords her no privacy. The girl with the name everyone has a reaction to.

***

I am afraid of it. Perhaps, I am afraid of me.

***

I was asked recently to share about my name. 

There has not been a time when I’ve entered a coffee shop, met a new group of people, or started an online account and not wondered the best way to introduce myself. For all of these experiences, for all the time I’ve spent sharing the story of how I got my name and how I interact with it, I should’ve been brimming with things to say. 

I felt I had nothing.

And yet, as I sat with this question (after I blurted out the same facts I always do), as I sat with the love with which the people around me infused their own names, something began to surface. 

***

I spoke with him twice and when I returned two weeks later, he stopped his conversation with the other customer and exclaimed my name, perfectly and without hesitation. Home in a foreign city.

***

For most of my life, I was the girl who presented either her middle name or an array of options, like flavors at Baskin-Robbins, to anyone who asked for her name. And the girl who didn’t truly care what people chose to call her, though it was always a pleasant surprise when a new acquaintance repeated her name back to her, especially when—whether on the first try or the tenth—they got it right.

But now, perhaps, it has shifted. 

How I present myself, I see now, depends a bit on the audience—the number of people, how much I know each of them, how I perceive each of them. Perhaps, it also depends a little on how much I love myself at that moment in time.

When I choose to use my real name (even as one option), I’m choosing vulnerability and openness. My name is an offering, an honor, a trophy—earned or not.

And when someone says my real name back to me, I hear love.

Maybe over time the people who start out using my given name develop new names for me. But those are born, not from laziness or a lack of intent, but from facets of me they have learned and they have loved.

Every utterance of my name is the choice to do the hard thing. An implication that I am worth that person’s time, that I deserve their effort, that I matter.

***

I am in love with it. Perhaps, I am in love with me.

***

I am the soul whose name he, she, they committed to memory.

I am the being whose name no one else embodies. I am the girl with the name with no known meaning. I am unbound, free to choose who I am.

I am an amalgamation of letters Abuela found in a book, an unknown book, and saved for later. Abuela could not use it for Mami, so Mami used it for me. I am, then, my grandma’s love of books. The interlocking of generations. The passing down of love. 

***

Sometimes, I know.

***

Once in a while, I say it and they attempt it, slowly, with care. And then when they’re certain, they repeat it, they savor its syllables, and I savor their love.