It doesn’t bother me, the notion of being another little person with another little name.
No documents or history, or star-stricken revelations to praise for times indefinite. Instead, only a half scratched out name on a few sticky notes and receipts.
The name that certainly won’t elicit verses worth writing and curate antiques worth hoarding beneath starving tags from full stomach, each one with more hungry zeroes than the next. Yet that name, the very same, small name is immortalized for only her on the cards that I’ve signed off every year and then inevitably, one final time before university.
Her name is a wordless memory not needing to be be written or recited, instead carefully nestled between snowy teeth unwilling to share its spoils.
The historians will never find my face in newspapers or murals but the polaroid she took of us will just as equally never have to taste a film of dust from how dear I’ll hold it to my heart. Shielded from prying eyes, not afraid of their apathy, only the stain it’d leave.
The playwrights and directors will not find a shroud of interest worth bringing to life, story long dead and buried but perhaps my forgotten letters will still hold the shape they pressed in those who embraced me.
And these hands, pruned with sentiment and weathered lovingly will recede to my skeleton and slink beneath mounds of dirt; beneath each maggot carved bone, milky and brittle, they will taste like copper and cheap ink and impossibly handmade suns found burrowed in the pockets of late night calls and library visits to study.
By the end, I will be smaller than I was at the beginning yet it will seem indifferent having felt and known more than the stone above and unknown beneath me could ever steal from me, another name at most.
