I never knew how to spell my middle name. As a kindergartener,  I would stare at my name spelled out, written by my mom in both print and elegant cursive. Later on, I thought of imitating that elegant cursive on many school trip permission slips, but they never made it out of the  hot-cheeto dust storm forming at the bottom of my clustered backpack in time to be signed. I still wonder to this day how a neat little name like mine could belong to such a messy person such as myself. I guess it’s true when they say never judge a book by its cover, or at least not until you actually read the book and see how perfectly the two compliment each other.

Sa’mya Monique Wilson. That is my name. A stolen name, or at least that’s the story my mother told me. “I stole your name from our cousin’s baby daddy’s other daughter,” my mother said when I asked her about the origin of my name. I find it funny that a name that I’ve found to be so unique growing up was borrowed from a distant cousin who technically wasn’t even in the family. I’ve never met anyone with the same name as me. In those same kindergarten days mentioned earlier all the way throughout middle school, kids always said my name was  “ghetto.” During recess we would sometimes talk about our names. I remember my fellow classmate Nakia saying, “Any Black sounding name with an apostrophe is automatically ghetto.” Maybe that’s the reason I go by my nickname, Mya. I have never understood why it was so hard for people to pronounce the “Sa” (pronounced “Su”) before the “Mya” or why autocorrect always had a different suggestion for my name. Growing up, I found myself wanting a simpler name. One of those names that you could find on a keychain at Disneyland or Six Flags. There was always a Sarah, Samantha, Susie, Susan, or Shannon, but never a Sa’mya.

In college,  people ask me why I go by Mya instead of Sa’mya. My answer varies each time I answer that question:  “It’s just easier to pronounce,” “It’s just a shorter nickname that everyone calls me.” Those are lies. The truth is simpler: When I filled out my application to Smith, the form prompted me to input a “preferred name,” and as I sat there in awe of the fact that I was even applying to such a prestigious school I entered “Mya.”  I wanted my peers to call me Sa’mya, but when I got admitted and my Onecard ID had “Mya” printed in bold letters next to the photo of my eager, smiling face, happy to even be admitted to college, my nickname stuck and from there on out I was known as Mya. But maybe there is poetic justice here, because, on the inside, I still am that little girl in kindergarten staring in awe at my name, at myself, and at who I am today. How could I ever live up to being Sa’mya Monique Wilson when I am still struggling to figure out who she even is?

“I always knew what I wanted to name my first child,” my mother told me, a unisex name in Haiti:  Valery for a boy or Valerie for a girl. But when it came to her second child, me, she was unsure. As the day of my birth approached, she pondered.

It appeared as though no name was good enough. (She would later go on to say that a lot of things weren’t good enough for her child.)

With no good names in mind, she thought of people she loved. She, of course, loved her mother, but wasn’t quite sold on giving me her mother’s name. And when she turned to her aunts and godmother, no name caught her attention. But when she got to her grandmother, it was exactly what she’d been looking for. She had found the perfect name.

On September 13th, 2002 my mother gave birth to me, a tiny and fragile little thing and said,  “Aline. That’s her name.” At least that’s what she told others when they asked.

There came a time when I wondered if my name had any other special meanings. I knew of others who proudly disclosed the meanings of their name. I typed “Aline name meaning” into the web browser. As I scrolled through many websites, one common meaning struck me, one specific to  the French language, as my name is a decently common French name:  Noble. I would later turn to my younger sister with a smile on my face and say, “My name means noble.”

As I got older, I earned a few nicknames, the most prevalent being “Lilou(e),” a  nickname that no one remembers inventing. Nonetheless, it’s well known and well used.

There would then come a time where I wanted to know the meaning of this nickname, too.  Lily. This was what came up most often this time. Lily. A plant that flowers between spring and fall, not quite knowing what color its petals will reveal. I find it quite fitting for me.

“Manmie,” I called out to my mother, “did you know that Aline means noble? And that Lilou means lily?”

“No, I didn’t. I wasn’t thinking of that when I chose your name but I like it,” my mother replied. “And you’ve always been smart. I didn’t need to know the meaning of your name to figure that one out.”

“I’m a noble lily,” I said with a smile.

“Yes. My noble lily. Always will be.”

I was an unplanned pregnancy, a child of two filmmakers raised in the Minneapolis punk-rock scene. My dad became an anti-natalist after majoring in philosophy in college, whereas my mom was raised to be anti-domesticity by her second-wave feminist mother. They never wanted kids, but when my mom’s pregnancy test came back positive on a late July day in 2000—right on the edge of her career’s success—they decided to say fuck it and go against the only outright rule they had made with their coupling.

They wanted an anomalous but cool name for their baby, a unique one that reflected their lives together and raised their friends’ eyebrows. My dad insisted on a one-syllable name to rival his life-long prejudice against nicknames, while also following the Goodermote tradition of short first names (my dad’s name is Mark, my aunt’s name is Dawn, my uncle’s name is Kurt, etc.). My mom wanted something influenced by her favorite musical artists, the ones she grew up with and shaped her identity. She heavily pushed for Ramona, after the Ramones, and Lyden, after John Lyden of the Sex Pistols, but my dad rejected both options.

They met on the set of Wind on the Bonneville Salt Flats, introduced to one another by the lead actress, Jennifer Grey. They were both dating people at the beginning of the two months filming in Utah and were together by the end. The wrap party was at an outdoor barbecue place off a freeway and it was there that Jennifer Grey jokingly mentioned that they should name their kid after her. They forgot about it, the comment lost in smoked pulled-pork and local canned IPAs. The sound mixer of Wind, a mutual friend of theirs who had been present at the wrap party, reminded them of Jennifer Grey’s passing comment three months into their arguments over baby names. The name Jennifer did not work for my dad’s one syllable rule, but Grey did—and Grey could also work for my mother’s hunt for a musical name. She never particularly loved Grey Lagoons by Roxy Music but her opinion of the song has since changed; she now croons it over the phone on my birthdays.

As the first child of a second marriage, I always knew my worth. My name reflected that. I had the most pictures, the newest clothes, and a suffocating amount of attention. My name was a reminder of the day my parents met—  aboard a ten-hour journey on a United Airlines aircraft from London to San Francisco. 

A doctor, middle-aged divorcé, and first-class passenger caught the eye of a newly single flight attendant, twenty years his junior. She possessed an intriguing aura of shyness and wisdom that he couldn’t quite place. It was an uncommon feeling, as he was pretty observant of others’ behaviors.   

They spoke for nine of the ten hours they were in the air. After she revealed that she enjoyed learning to mountain bike on the rocky terrain of Moab Utah with her ex-boyfriend, the doctor invited her to the birthplace of mountain biking and the county in which he resided, Marin. 

The flight attendant had a two-day layover, and when she arrived at her hotel one of her coworkers, Mia, asked her how the flight was. She told her that she met a passenger, a doctor, in a blush-colored button-down shirt who gave her his number, but that she thought nothing of it and probably wouldn’t call him. 

But Mia was insistent and convinced her to give him a chance, and so it began. He picked her up in San Francisco and drove her forty minutes into the suburbs where he rented her a mountain bike and led her along the trails dappled with redwoods, ferns, and California poppies.  When the young woman arrived back at her hotel in San Francisco, she was already planning when she would be back to see the doctor. This was all thanks to her friend Mia. 

Mia in many languages refers to the words mine, beloved, or darling. My name, Mia, represented an ode to the love and connection that my parents first experienced when they crossed paths 30,000 feet above the earth, halfway across the world. 

When I was little, I loved playing this game:

“Guess how to spell my middle name! Guess!”

“How do you say it?”

“Sh-ee-ah-na”

“Sheeana?”

“Sheeana”

“Okay. S-H-”

“Nope!”

“Z-?”

“Nope!”

After dragging the guessing part out for as long as possible, I could finally unveil the true name like a trophy: Xiana. I’m sure my mom loved the routine. I was several years older when she took me to my name’s  place of origin for the first time, to meet the family my grandparents had left behind.

In the coastal town of Ferrol, winds whip through stone streets where old men and women smoke and talk and drink in plastic chairs pushed out onto the cobblestone. Colorful apartments are stacked on shops and bars with doors thrown open to the world. The food is plain but much fresher than what we have in Texas. It’s small, humble, but inarguably beautiful.

I hated visiting. To be honest, I hope to never do it again. I have not told my mom this because, one, I would seem ungrateful, and two, she  wouldn’t understand why. It isn’t easy to explain.

I’d never felt so small as when I was there. Small as a particle of dust tracked in by a tourist in the cavernous Santiago cathedral. Some say Hispanic people are obsessed with death. Our particular region of Spain is obsessed with witchcraft (it’s true). I turned and rubbed the red, blue, and white clay charms between my childlike hands there, charms said to ward against misfortunes.  I exhausted myself trying to catch snippets of translatable Spanish shooting rapid-fire from my relatives’ lips.

“Did you hear about the two young people who died after an elevator fell in Galicia? Only eighteen! So young! So tragic!” My Spanish relative went on with these strange tabloid stories. I don’t even know how we’re related. We were visiting the place my relatives are buried. Tiny box after box forming apartment window rows of remains. A cramped cemetery in a cramped country. No more room for its ghosts.

Later we visited a relative we call Meluchi, the last of my great-grandmother’s seven sisters. It’s not her real name, but that’s commonplace; everyone in Ferrol has a unique nickname —“Chinto,” “Meluchi,” “Peeley,” “Marianjoles.” My mom had a secret agenda: to get the ancient, family-kept recipe for a brew that is supposed to protect life, made with special herbs picked under a full moon or some such. Witchcraft, I told you. White-haired, wrinkled, hunched, as very old ladies typically are, you would never have expected Meluchi to be so funny. Her quick, good-humored jabs made us giggle even after translation. I watch her at family gatherings. How old—? She once looked straight at me and spoke something in Spanish which I felt in my teenage brain had to be of utmost, cosmic, personal significance. The calm, unsurprised disappointment in her expression, when I just replied I didn’t understand, sent that sinking dread right back to my stomach.

Surely at her age, Meluchi wasn’t all there. She thought she still ran the Loteria she had owned decades before. And yet, when my mother pressed her through a combination of pleasing smiles and a forceful tongue—my mom can be very persuasive—I swear Meluchi’s knowing face flashed mischievously while she clung to the claim that she’d lost it, or didn’t remember, or gave it to such and such forever ago. Her pale eyes twinkled at us, us unknowing foreigners. After a long time my mom finally forfeited. We left without the recipe.

I may be named after the land, but I knew, I could tell, that it didn’t  want me. It’s okay; we agreed mutually to stay apart, and split amicably. I watched movies on the flight home and tried to ignore visions of falling airplanes. Slowly, I stopped feeling like I was going to die all the time.

And I continue to think of Meluchi, who is older than she should be, and who still lives yet.

I am nobody special, but I say that lovingly. I played in mud even after being scolded indefinitely, I devoured books like my life was just as in danger as the protagonist’s, and I sunk into my mother’s arms after I tripped on the sidewalk for the twentieth time every day. She cooed my name for the twentieth time, holding my fragile body like I was a porcelain doll, dressed in only the finest (from the thrift store) and fed like royalty (that budgeted government assistance). I was like any other snotnosed kid with heedful eyes and a brain that absorbed everything those eyes latched onto.

My mother would not say the same. It makes sense to hyperfocus on the someone you created from nothing. When two other girls in my elementary school shared my full name, she lamented she would have chosen differently if she knew, because of course mi princesa deserves the best. How different was I really from those two girls?

The name is where the deviation started.

“I would really prefer Julian. Please.” My sophomore year of high school was kicked off by my decision to debut as somebody worth paying attention to, but despite my insistence I wasn’t. My academics might have shown a star, but I was petrified of what name might be inscribed on a plaque and who could read it. Under no circumstances could I stand out: no trouble, no calls home, no parent-teacher functions without scripting beforehand. I strained under the weight of secrecy, but my name was my privilege. I treasured it like an old pair of jeans. 

Months later, walking home from school and preparing to make my bodily switch, I got a call from my mom. 

“Why are people calling you Julian?”

That day, my name became an insult. She had looked through my journal entries, which were hoping and wishing for a different, shinier life. And, consistent with the fantasy, I had signed them: Julian Valentín Hernandez.

Hearing her say it was like water stuck in my ears, pounding at my brain. There was no warmth in the way she said it. Indifference would have been preferred, the neutral confusion of a name without prejudgement, but each vowel was spit with ire and animosity.

Through the course of the next four years, I grew and matured and I understood myself more fully, but I lived under an unrelenting rule: 

“Do not call me Julian at home.”

“Oh, sorry, does your mom not know yet?” People always asked, eager for any way to support. I appreciated it, but it was family business.

“No, she does. But it’s… It’s a whole thing. It’s fine.” It had to be. It would have been easier to bare my teeth and walk out the door the day I turned 18, maybe, but I’d been raised to love my family through the worst. 

Loving my family is less painful now across the country, in college. When I call home, we can laugh and gossip like always, and my mother  will console me when I moan about the cold, just like when I’d fall on the sidewalk so long ago. But when the calls end, and I live my name, she is not there to hear it.

When I was christened, did she fantasize about hearing it echo against church pews? Did she murmur it over my cradle as I gripped her finger, wondering if I would grip a pen or a paintbrush next? All the things that identified me were now filed under “Julian.”  Everything but her.