Name
1214 Words
The problem with wanting to know someone's name is that there is no casual way to find it out.
You can't ask directly. Not without explaining why you're asking, which requires admitting how long you didn't know, which requires admitting how long you've been paying attention without introduction. That's a conversation I was not prepared to have with anyone, least of all myself.
So I did what any reasonable person does in this situation.
I listened.
Corridors are useful for this. People call out to each other across them constantly, names flying back and forth like they cost nothing, like names are just sounds and not the specific key that unlocks an entire person. I positioned myself near the notice board twice that morning, which was where I'd first seen her, on the reasonable assumption that people tend to move in patterns even when they don't realise it.
She didn't appear.
I checked the corridor outside the library at lunch, which I told myself was because I needed a book, which was not entirely untrue, I did need a book, I just also needed to walk past three times before going in.
Nothing.
By the time I sat down in the afternoon I had accomplished one thing, an awareness that I was now the kind of person who loitered near notice boards, which was not a version of myself I had anticipated becoming.
"You look like you're planning something," Luca said, dropping into the seat beside me.
"I'm not planning anything."
"You have a planning face."
"I don't have a planning face."
"Ren." He turned to look at me directly, with the particular patience of someone who has decided to wait you out. "You've been weird since yesterday."
"I'm always weird."
"Different weird. Distracted weird." He paused. "Who is she."
It wasn't a question. That was the thing about Luca, he rarely actually asked things. He just said them in the shape of a question and waited for you to confirm.
"I don't know what you're talking about."
"Right." He opened his notebook, unbothered, which was somehow worse than if he'd pushed further. Luca not pushing meant he had already decided he would find out on his own timeline, and his timeline was always shorter than you hoped.
I turned back to the front of the room.
The lecture started. I took notes, which was something I did when I needed to look like I was somewhere I wasn't entirely. The pen moved. The words landed on the page. Somewhere behind me someone's phone buzzed twice and was silenced.
I was fine.
I was completely fine.
I saw her at twenty past four.
Not to talk to. Not even close. She was on the far side of the courtyard, sitting on the low wall near the trees with two people I didn't recognise, and she was laughing at something one of them had said, properly laughing, head tilting back slightly, one hand coming up to cover her mouth the way people do when something catches them off guard and they're not ready for it.
I stopped walking.
Not deliberately. My feet just made a decision without consulting me.
This was different from every other time I had seen her. Every other time she had been adjacent to me in some way, entering the same doorway, returning a water bottle, saying a word in my direction. She had always been, in some small sense, aware of my existence when I was watching.
Not this time.
This time she was entirely somewhere else. Laughing at something that had nothing to do with me, with people I didn't know, in a moment I had no part in. She pushed her hair back from her face and said something that made the person beside her groan and cover their eyes, and she looked deeply satisfied about this, the kind of satisfied that comes from landing a joke perfectly and knowing it.
It was such a small thing.
I don't know why it landed the way it did. Maybe because every version of her I had constructed in my head over seven months had been built entirely from glimpses, fragments, the edge of expressions I caught before they finished. I had filled in the rest myself, which meant the person I'd been thinking about for seven months was mostly my own imagination wearing her face.
This was the first time I saw something I hadn't put there.
She was funny. Or at least she thought she was, which amounted to the same thing. She had friends who groaned at her jokes and she found that satisfying. She sat on low walls with her feet not quite reaching the ground and she laughed with her whole face.
I hadn't known any of that.
I started walking again before she could turn and catch me standing there like an i***t in the middle of the courtyard. Kept my eyes ahead, kept my pace even, made it around the corner and exhaled slowly against the wall.
This was worse than not knowing.
When she was just a portrait I could keep her at a comfortable distance, something to observe and move on from. But she was laughing at bad jokes on a Tuesday afternoon and covering her mouth with her hand and she had no idea I existed and somehow that was the most devastating thing I had encountered all week.
I pulled out my phone.
Still not telling me? Luca had sent, three hours ago.
I stared at it for a moment.
I don't even know her name, I typed back.
The three dots appeared immediately, which meant he had been waiting.
That's the most you thing I've ever heard.
I put my phone away.
He wasn't wrong.
It came, eventually, the way things do when you stop looking directly at them.
I was leaving the building, bag over one shoulder, already composing the list of things I had not done today that I had intended to, when I heard it from somewhere just behind me.
A voice, calling across the steps.
"Nora!"
I didn't stop walking. But I slowed down, just slightly, the way you do when something snags without you meaning to let it.
Footsteps behind me, quick, and then past me, and she moved through the door I had just come out of without looking back, the slight curl of her hair catching the late light for exactly one second before she was gone.
Nora.
I stood on the steps for a moment longer than necessary.
So that was it. That was the thing I'd been trying to find for two days. Four letters. Two syllables. The most ordinary sound in the world, and somehow now the only word I could hear in my head, sitting in the exact space behind my eyes where silence used to be.
I started walking home.
The evening was the kind that can't decide what it wants to be, too warm for autumn, too restless for summer, the sky doing something complicated in the west that I didn't have a name for either.
Some things you carry quietly, I thought. And some things, the moment they get a name, become impossible to put down.
I already knew which kind this was.
- Writer
