Names

Names hold us in like boundaries. They are the extent of our aspirations. We know there are at least a thousand others with the same name as us. And we know that if we don’t fight it, we’ll be lost in the multitudes. The names we were given become our boundaries and our maps into the outside world.

Some names were lost to the world even as they carved out places for themselves, to rest for all eternity. They battled against the earth and birthed some of the most steadfast wonders of the world. But all we remember are the names of the gods that they wrested from the grip of the stone of mountains. All we see are the forms of divinity scored into the rough and unyielding rock; rock that now smiles and dances for eyes through centuries in it’s perfect stillness. Stories unfold time and time again without so much as the slightest quiver on the surface.

The rhythmic violence with which we meet life is a beautiful testament to the fact that the human mind needs a reason to lash out and chafe against something, anything. It needn’t be a concrete foe or a tangible dilemma. We will try and score our names into the memories of something. Some succeed and others only make the feeblest swipe into the stone of time. And that is a strange stone, for sometimes it is like the peat in a bog, filling in scars made in its face with a merciless regularity. And yet, there are those extraordinary human beings that survive the ebb and surge of the way mankind goes from one wonder to the next atrocity.

So my name might fade away into the night of ages. And it may never be remembered, recanted or quoted in reverent terms. But I know that I tried to scratch myself into the unyielding memory of neighbourhood of my time.