This is the mundane power of a name.\u00a0 A thing they call you, and when they say it, you turn your head.\u00a0 Whether you turn toward them to acknowledge or turn away, keep shuffling forward as if you didn\u2019t hear, it doesn\u2019t matter.\u00a0 A name is a tug on a leash.<\/p>\n
This is the enduring flow of a name.\u00a0 The source can be the slightest spark of imagination inside a kid\u2019s head, just one look at you and he makes some connection in that underfed brain of his, somewhere in that primordial muck of cartoons and big daddy\u2019s drunk talk.\u00a0 And when it pops out of his mouth, everyone else picks it up and spreads it around because, however clever or inane it is, it\u2019s catchy\u2014quick and apt.\u00a0 Toss it around the playground, make sure everyone knows.\u00a0 And, years later, when everyone\u2019s forgotten that afternoon when you first got your common name, when whatever was on your birth certificate got erased and redrawn in scrawling, elementary letters, when all aspects of that day\u2014falling, scattered leaves, tough rubber ball, the scrape of girls\u2019 shoes on the pavement\u2014have faded only one thing will remain.\u00a0 Intangible as it is, they grip it tight like a ticket, their admission into the culture.\u00a0 A name is the longest unit of time.<\/p>\n
Ghost, he called you.<\/p>\n
By the time you show up at college, three states away, you\u2019re comfortable in this existence, and it\u2019s a dark little town with its own secrets, its own spirits, a romance of its own making that both precludes and allows reinvention, reassertion, renaming.\u00a0 On the first day, you take down from the door into your dorm room the little construction paper star bearing a foreign, old name.\u00a0 And when your roommate shows up and shakes your hand you\u2019re already high, and you say, jaw stuck a little, \u201cGhost.\u00a0 Everybody calls me Ghost.\u201d\u00a0 This is you chewing through the leash.<\/p>\n Walking along Royal Street, tobacco biting through the cold, scentless air, you are eighteen and invisible, wrapped up in a warm jacket and a warmer set of headphones, the Walkman pushing the decibels\u2014your bone\u2019s got a little ma-chine!<\/em>\u2014and at the corner you see a girl waiting for a stoplight.\u00a0 You think nothing of it, save the initial primal reaction to her figure, but you pause a half-step behind her, bathed in the authoritative red light.\u00a0 Last thing you expect, she turns around after a minute of waiting.\u00a0 Her mouth moves and her eyes say something, too.\u00a0 You pull off one side of the phones, oooaah-what?<\/p>\n \u201cI like that song.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cOh, yeah?\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cI love it.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cYou could hear it, huh?\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cYeah, you have it pretty loud, there.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cThis town is spooky without some tunes.\u201d<\/p>\n She smiles and knows what you mean.\u00a0 She tells you it\u2019s okay to look by telling you her name.<\/p>\n The light turns green and then red again.<\/p>\n Her house is across the street.\u00a0 Later, you will climb these stairs a thousand times, rush up them, confidently and maybe two at a time with your long legs.\u00a0 But now, this first time, you\u2019re taking them in small steps, shifting your weight to avoid creaking, and thinking the whole time, I\u2019m about to be visible<\/em>.<\/p>\n And it changes you, your emotions are rushing along, filling up your heart with double-spaced thoughts and responses.\u00a0 For the first time, no one\u2019s looking through you and there\u2019s no easy way out, no dropping back into the shade because she\u2019s always searching for you, seeking out your hand, her thumb on your wrist and your pulse signaling back.\u00a0 Even though you\u2019re as white as ever, your skin feels colored and alive when her belly slides against yours or her hair sweeps a blank stare off of your face.\u00a0 You like it so much and you like her paintings and every cassette on her shelf and you\u2019re finding out, more and more every night, that the kid back there on the playground didn\u2019t know shit.\u00a0 He had a loud mouth and no brains, because if there\u2019s anything that you\u2019re not, it\u2019s dead.\u00a0 So you hand her the leash and you reassign time to her beat and you tell her your real name, the one you thought you\u2019d packed away and forgotten.\u00a0 And she uses it, but only when no one else is around, because with you two, nothing is more important than the language you are creating for yourselves.<\/p>\n That language.\u00a0 Who has a record of it now?\u00a0 Where is the translating dictionary?\u00a0 Is it still written on your heart or are those words gone from modern memory, existing solely as indecipherable glyphs and staticky chatter now that those people have disappeared?\u00a0 The past and present argue with each other in differing tongues.\u00a0 Fifteen, fourteen, thirteen years gone, now.\u00a0 It seems silly now, all the code and all the confiding.\u00a0 But that\u2019s what first loves do: reassign all stored power, rename all the species, refute all evidence.\u00a0 Because back then it seemed all right to be a ghost in that glorious afterlife of childhood, restless and in pieces.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" This is the mundane power of a name.\u00a0 A thing they call you, and when they say it, you turn your head.\u00a0 Whether you turn toward them to acknowledge or turn away, keep shuffling forward as if you didn\u2019t hear, …<\/p>\n
\nAnd this is the intimate thrust of a name.\u00a0 How, really, you never thought of yourself as a ghost, how you think of E.T. in his sheet or the winding, open-mouthed shriekers from Poltergeist<\/em>.\u00a0 How your idea differs\u2026but you can see where they\u2019re coming from.\u00a0 Your skin is visible at night, wriggling white fingers in front of your eyes when you can\u2019t sleep.\u00a0 You don\u2019t say much, and when you do the intermittent time has made your throat dry and your tongue clumsy.\u00a0 Ooooaaaah<\/em>, the kids imitate.\u00a0 Ooooaaaah<\/em>, may I go to the bathroom, Mrs. Kinney<\/em>?\u00a0 And so, soon enough, you find yourself living it a little bit.\u00a0 You let the name direct your actions.\u00a0 Walk along the farthest edge of the soccer field.\u00a0 Your breathing starts to slow and quiet down.\u00a0 You let people see right through you.\u00a0 You start to prefer dark places.\u00a0 You keep the lights in your bedroom off.\u00a0 And, one night, fifteen and nervous, you pull out the thin J, light it, and breathe it like you think you know how.\u00a0 Next thing you know the stereo comes on by itself (you think) and you will it louder (it seems) and the bed reaches out and pulls you down and you sink right through it, enmeshed in the mattress, breathing fabric, head drowning in music (Obscured by Clouds<\/em>), swimming in a mass, and the eyes of every girl you\u2019ve liked show up and see right through you and it\u2019s kind of calming (you don\u2019t really need them, do you?).<\/p>\n