Unbridgeable roads of change. Navigable only via the compass of a name that ties you to both ends of your cultural spectrum. I clutch these pages and caress them as I ponder the capacity at which one has to choose a name that can access worlds and what may happen without a name that your own homeland believes to be adjacent to a foreign entity and an enemy.
A name is a border checkpoint
pronounced daily by mouths that do not know
what they are admitting or denying.
Stamped in red or waved through with a smile,
it decides whether your body is suspicious
before it decides whether your voice is welcome.
I have learned how to shorten myself
at customs,
how to soften consonants into something harmless,
how to let vowels behave.
Some names arrive armed.
Some arrive already apologising.
The tongue becomes a translator before the heart does.
The heart learns late that it is allowed to speak.
I sign papers with one hand and memory with the other,
never certain which will be recognised as legitimate.
There are worlds that open when my name is said correctly,
and rooms that seal shut the moment it is misheard.
I live in the hinge between those moments,
a person unfolding and refolding
to fit the mouth that calls them.
