Celebrating My Namelessness
Not a rainy or stormy day. Neither is there full sunshine. This is an ordinary day, with no distinguishing mark. There is absolutely nothing about this day that would make you remember it later. The day is as ordinary as this drink of the day at the bar where I am sitting at the moment. Instead of enjoying my drink, if one can ever enjoy something very ordinary, I am constantly stirring it, trying to remember my name. But I don’t. The only thing I surely know about myself is that I am an immigrant in this country where I am currently living. I also know about this strange amnesia I have experienced since this morning upon opening my eyes to the world in which several people are on the move from one part to another, while many like myself have already completed their move, without feeling settled in the place they had arrived many years ago.
Maybe this is the reason why I woke up this morning remembering everything, every futile piece of information and every unnecessary name I knew at some point and time in my life but my own name. I woke up fully conscious to the full knowledge of the little things that binds my consciousness with the world around me, yet I myself did not know who I am!
That is the reason everything and everyone suddenly fell apart for me since my nameless awakening this morning. It took me some time, however, to recognize this. But once I identified my situation, I felt the nausea I woke up with—so I had to lie down again for a while. But after a while I lifted myself out of the bed again and headed for the bar at the end of my street to get the ordinary drink of the day on this ordinary day.
Perhaps my name remains somewhere on a clean piece of animal skin buried deep beneath the earth, which seems so crowded, so strewn, and so littered it gives me perpetual nausea. Or perhaps it is written on a grain of sand, one among many, moving across some vast and empty desert. Perhaps it is frozen into the heart of this small iceberg melting in my “drink of the day” as I sit at this freezing bar, perspiring, and furiously stirring the ice cube around, and, in this vertiginous state, trying to remember my name.
And I don’t. No matter how much I stir my drink with this drinking straw— which looks like a hollowed umbilical cord and continuously clicks in the same rhythm my temples pound. This click-click aggravates my nausea and echoes in my head as the ice hits the glass bouncing around its foamy mouth.
What’s the purpose of this stirring anyways? I am all wasted—I’ve stirred everything I could think of—for long and for nothing. Stop stirring now, and forever, and forget about your name, I command myself.
But I don’t stop. And I think through this sensation of whirling and getting strewn that perhaps if only I could get my hands to my mind, literally, and stir it, something would come up. I need to rummage through my mind, through this scattered-ness.
No, rummaging doesn’t help. What I need to do is to excavate my mind. That’s the thing: to dig deep under my mind-full-of-namelessness. But where can I find my buried mindfulness? Under the earth of my mind? Which is perhaps buried under another earth? So dispersed, crowded, and littered that nothing could be found in it—even something as familiar as my name.
Perhaps I should search inside my navel for my name. Search inside this entangled poor lost thing that keeps me together. No, it doesn’t —this virtual connection. That’s the reason I am so strewn, so drowning like grain of sand in the drops of water in this straw in this glass filled with ice cubes and the drink of the day, which I am sucking. Perhaps I could be grafted again to my navel, to its puckered mouth. But the length of the umbilical cord has long lost its grasp. Someone has severed the cord and thrown it out in the dirt as if it was something superfluous—something I can survive without. And I can’t—without my name.
That is why I dig into the contact list on my Facebook—confused—because I am well aware of the fact that my Facebook name is a pseudo name I chose for myself in order to befriend people in this country I immigrated to. None of my friends names—Jennifer, Fatima, Mina, Sharon, Rhea, and—and—and—tells something, however, about who I am. No “Face” stirs a sense in me. Then I search the Internet, which somehow reminds me of my navel, because when you wake up one ordinary day with a perpetual nausea you suddenly find yourself absorbed in digging crap from a little hole with its many tunnels where so much dirt has gathered that it is enough for you to spend all your life, all your ordinary days of scattered-ness—digging and digging and digging nonstop.
But none of the names-attached-to-the faces I dig out stirs a sense in me. Only my name does, which has dropped off by itself, just like the dried umbilical cord, which drops off a few days after birth, leaving the navel—a little entanglement with no distinguishing mark except for its tedious folds where dirt gathers.
