For Namesake ; Part Two

When I still lived in the States I'd resigned to answering only to Sky, because it was simple and I was never anywhere long enough for my last name to come up. It might’ve been a beautiful name to me if my least favorite color wasn’t blue, which is also my mother’s fault. Her favorite color is, of course, blue, and since my autonomy was something for others to claim in my childhood, she liked a daughter better who had a turquoise walled room and only wore blue clothes. Imagine an olive toned, autumn palette little girl with freckles, copper brown hair, and soil colored eyes only ever wearing blue. Blues make a girl sick.

I don't remember if I ever liked my name before learning of the one that was mine in the womb, but people often use my name for pun or comparison. I used to hear all the time, "You're the limit Sky!" I still don't know what that means, but I'm not particularly keen on being limited by, or being the thing that limits anyone. Or things like, "My favorite color is blue. Especially Sky blue, like you," "Is Sky going to be happy or sad today? Let's check the weather- Oh, a little bit of everything it seems."

I have looked to the Sky as a mirror my whole life, and I have never cared for what I see.

Elusive, lonely. Too big to swallow, looming against her will, messenger of natural disasters, unpredictable. Wishing she could be consistent in how she showed up everyday, though never actually growing into anything either. Rootless, easy to forget about. And perpetually, always, significantly less beautiful than all the celestial creatures among her. Sky is not the moon, not the sun or the stars, not even the clouds. Unreachable, intangible, is Sky even real? Void. A nothing thing. No way to touch, hold, or embrace.

There have been times when I thought maybe I could begin to love the Sky if we began to work together to design a day. If I could pray for rain, clouds, colors, fog, clear days. But I do not hold any powers like this, and she doesn't really have any power either. Nature is just happening in the frame of her shape and she relents to it. A friend recently pointed out to me- “You don’t seem to have any say in the way the Sky shows up for the day, but you do seem to be doubly affected by how she’s doing.” Seems I relent, too.

Last year I was on a walk with my mom in the Spring, and I always find Spring to be the season that aches the most. I never feel ready to come out of Winter and catch up to the pace of things blooming. I think my mom experiences the same thing, but she hates the Winter so she'd never say anything like this for fear Winter might never leave her if she did. So amidst our aching I asked her anyway, “Ma, if I wanted to change my name to what you intended for it to be for me, would you give it to me?”

She sighed and said something like, “I don’t understand why you think of things like this. I really don’t think you would care about stuff like this if you would just get married and have babies. You can give that name to one of your kids.”

I suppose this could only be said from a girl who is not formally a mother but I only responded, “It’s not their name, it’s mine.”

I looked up above me and stared at the thing that's always staring back at me. For as big a thing as the Sky, it sure does make me feel small. 

Recently I was sitting with a friend who had just given birth to her first daughter. She’d been conflicted about her daughter's name, but had come to a resolution and said to me, "I've given this name to her because it feels like a good one for now. But there is another name she gave to us in a dream that will serve as a North Star for her. For now she will hold this name I've given to her, and she will walk toward that other name like a North Star, until she someday feels ready to be known by it."

I have a North Star name, I thought, but I am not ready to be known by that name.

Every year I get closer to abandoning my namesake and the story I've gotten stuck in with it. I have always assumed that when something begins to itch, it means that it's time for it to shed. But lately, every time I've felt like tearing the shape of this name apart and crawling away from it, someone says something that convinces me to hold on to it for just a while longer.

Before I left the U.S. my friend said to me, “I am going to miss having my own piece of Sky to hug, and go on walks with, and just be on the ground next to.” In December I was at Spanish school in Central America frowning at my textbook upon seeing that my name in Spanish looks like ceiling. Well that sure is a thing of limit, I thought. But then I met a woman in a garden who said her 4 year old daughter and I had the same name, and as her daughter sprinted past us her mother called out, "Cielo! Come meet my friend Sky!" I don't know if it was because it was her mothertongue, or if it was because mothers have a way of saying things that make you listen clearly, but I heard that name as a beautiful sound. A few days later I walked into Spanish school and my professor called out to me, “Buenas Dias Cielito!” And I did catch myself smiling. In January my friend was visiting me in a treehouse on squatter's rights land, and upon hearing the story of my newfound name, with Hebrew as his mothertongue, said, "I know you as Shiamim." I asked him to say it over again many times.

In February I was befriending the free Gods of Bahrat's land and every time I introduced myself I would listen intently as the new friends before me would hear my name, pause, look between me and the Sky, and say, "Aakaash? Akasha?" Head nodding side to side. There has been something so soothing about hearing this name in languages beyond the land I come from.

When a Sinhalese man helped me find my way in March he asked me for my name. Without opening my mouth, I just pointed up, and his eyes grew lovely as he said, “Ahasa!”

In April my Balinese friend told me if I met someone named Bintang I should fall in love with them. When I asked why, they said, "Because Bintang means star. And your name is Langit. It would just be so romantic to see Bintang and Langit in love on earth." I did not meet a Bintang, but I did take this as a prophesy to keep in my back pocket.

The other day my German friend asked me for anime recommendations, so I told her about a German-inspired one called Frieren: Beyond Journey's End. I was extra excited to share this with her because a week before, I’d visited the blue sea of flowering Nemophilia fields in Japan, because they are the favorite flower of a beloved character of mine from that show. She thought this was lovely and asked, "And who is the character on this show that loves the blue flowers?" "Himmel!" I told her. She laughed at me and said, "That's your name in German, you know." And soon after, while wandering the streets in Fukushima prefecture I took a photo of a shop with this Kanji character 空 and the name Sora accompanying it. I took a photo of it so I could write it down in my journal because both were beautiful, and I thought Sora would be a good name for someone with wings. One of my friends was helping me practice my Hiragana and Katakana alphabets in this journal, and she eagerly pointed at the new character I’d written down as she said, "Ah! Your name!"

I've been looking up at the Sky a lot more than I usually do these past couple months. I'm slowly learning new things in the mirror of her that I only could have found by changing the place from which I gazed back at her.

Somehow she is actually is quite consistent, in the way that she shows up for the whole world. She never shows up as the same thing, but she does always show up. Most of life is about showing up I think, and I can see how showing up as something new everywhere is part of her charm. I have begun to understand why blue is such a beloved color, because the quality of her blue is different in each place. It's very subtle, you can't describe it too much. And where before I always felt like the Sky and her blue were envious of the Earth and her green, I now feel like they go together quite nicely.

All this time spent thinking that my itching meant there was a need for shedding, but itching can also mean that something is healing, too. It is beautiful to me, the way life and the people around us teach us how to and why we should love. You can fall in love with anything just by seeing it through the eyes of those who already do. Or by hearing of it spoken of in another language. I s'pose names are not merely noises after all, but sounds we wish to hear more of. Sounds that we want to become. People have called me by my name like it's the song of myself, and have sweet talked me into remembering what an honor it is to share a name with the big blue expanse above us.

I stand among the wind next to seasides and atop mountains, wearing mostly white these days, like a flag. I have not forgotten about my intended name, and I walk towards it like the North Star it has always been. Someday I will feel truly ready to change the shape of my life and myself and be known by that name. I will ask my Ma again to give it to me. And this time, though she will think it a bit dramatic and arbitrary, she will agree to do that ceremony with me, because as much as it is my name, it was hers, too.

My North Star name will come back to me in time, as I walk towards its direction day by day. In the meantime, I will continue to gaze up at the Sky in different corners of this world, listening more intently to the song of my namesake, and I will enjoy my Kid-name for a while longer.