The Name They Gave Me

On her first morning at the laundry, the manager could not fit her name in his mouth.

He tried twice, gave up, and said she would simply be called Anna instead.

The name was given to her the way a uniform is handed out, without asking.

Although she disliked it at first, Anna was easier for everyone, and easier meant safer.

Her real name was folded away, kept in a pocket she rarely dared to open.

At the machines, she was told when to start, when to stop, and when to eat.

The other workers, most of them born here, spoke fast and laughed at jokes she missed.

Although she smiled along, the words washed over her like water over smooth stone.

Each evening her name was called from a list, and she answered to a stranger's sound.

Slowly she began to answer to Anna even in her own thoughts, and that frightened her.

A name, she learned, can be worn so long that the wearer forgets it was borrowed.

Although the pay was small, she was grateful to be counted, listed, and paid at all.

On the bus home, she practised her true name silently, moving only her lips.

It still lived somewhere inside her, quiet but not yet lost, waiting to be spoken.

Her landlady, kind but hurried, also called her Anna and never once asked for more.

Although the new name opened doors, each door quietly closed on a part of her past.

She wondered how many others in this city had been renamed for someone else's comfort.

The city was full of Annas and Toms who had once been called something richer.

At night she wrote her real name in the fog on the cold window glass.

By morning it had faded, erased by the heat of the room, as if it had never been.

Although a name is only a sound, she felt each loss like a small wound.

She decided she would answer to Anna outside, but stay herself within these walls.

The two names would have to live together, at least until the city learned hers.

She was not yet ready to choose between them, and perhaps she never would be.

For now, survival wore one name, and memory kept the other, folded but alive.

Somewhere between the two, she suspected, her real self was quietly waiting.