What's in a name?

The preview line of the email read "Holy shit. I just realized your not A. Davis anymore."

What a conflicting thing to read. I felt immediately smug that my new last name is Mojgani which means I married a man that I love and I loved him enough that it made sense that we would share a name. He agreed to take mine as his middle name so we are going quasi-modern on this one.

But after the smug pride of being married came defensiveness. I am too a Davis! I have years of christmas trees and scraped knees, bee stings,  camping trips and popsicle summers to prove it. I can tell you about how my brother cracked his head open on the basement-stair overhang or just the way he sounded when scaring me by howling "I'm Old! Warn Away!" Davis means long car rides and getting sick off of cheezits and tall grass adventures at the ocean. When cousin peed her pants in the back yard. Playing office in the graveyard tree. The gray ghost. Crunching cans, burning ears of indian corn, pouring ice-skating rinks on the bricks at the Steger's. Blue angel bicycle rides. Summer bar-b-ques in the back. Cousin club christmas carols (sorry kelly and brianne). Davis is tattooed on my skin in the day-i-fell-off-the-cherry-tree scar. In the cut-my-finger-open-with-my-pocket-knife-I-got-from-being-a-YMCA-indian-princess scar. Buckin' bronco oceanside nights stretching out as far as the ocean. Far back as I can remember. I got Davis so deep and wide in me I don't know how to be anything else.

I'll take Mojgani with smug pride and warm belly love. Smile when I sign credit card transactions or say "Yes I will spell that for you..." It is not that I want to give Mojgani up and take Davis back. I couldn't because I never lost Davis. Mojgani is like a job title. A description of something I do: Hi. I am Alexis. I am great with kids, I love puppies, I don't often finish things I start or start things I want to do, my last name is Mojgani, and I am a Davis.


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

15/30

15/30 Your Name Means Late-Summer or Warlike Girl, you make me want to say girl in that way where the rrrrrr ’s roll out forever and the i becomes a u . Yeah. That’s right. And you make me want to roll up the bottom of my jeans, shove collected countries in the back pockets and collected men between my thighs. Stop collecting dreams. Girl, you make me want to rock climb—cover myself in that fine chalk powder dust, grunt like I want it, till my hand skin comes off in chunks. And you make me want to eat meat. Fuck chicken and fish. I mean steak. Cooked rare. Make me want to barbecue, corn kernels for floss and watermelon seeds for spitting. You make me want to shower in garden-hoses, drink BudLight around campfires, wear flannel. Want to tan like I was one-sixteenth Indian. Girl, you make me want to get high and ride public transportation with the retarded kids. Or stay up all night driving the screen saver into space. Girl. You make me want to slow. this. shit. down.
Read more
2/30 It must be five o'clock already in Chicago, the clouds are full of hail. The books on the shelf are segregated, one for fiction and one for non. I hear them shouting at one another. They shout letters of the alphabet. At the antique store on Western the son of the old man talks about the deal he got on the fabric upstairs--because some old lady died and nobody knew how much that fabric was worth In the room that is second to the entrance there are bins of old photographs. An old man squats, tending to a tree. Dad. Sun Morn. '48. I guess nobody knows, but I'm standing over these bins and I can hear the books at home yelling the alphabet at one another.
Read more

All caught up!

10/30 dreamed again. tonight I dreamed of making muffins and babies. I told you (unexpectedly) that you were the only man I'd ever want to make babies with and you told me I was beautiful every day for two-hundred-sixty-six days. we named our children Sweetbelly and Stickylove and when they were outside, we kept them in fruit trees and when they were inside we kept them in our arms. This is how they never learned the feet/ground rules. Then, when we loved too much, we would have to go check on the tomatoes. dreamed again. we didn't have a dishwasher, so that I could take my time with all those muffins. I smiled and told Sweetbelly to be careful. She had jam on her face and it was scorpion season; so then you wrote poetry about scorpions and jam--about sweet tomatoes and muffins. and when it was late at night I would wake and find you rocking Stickylove and fatherhood carefully in your arms--the way my mom used to find dad. Lost in that rocking chair; and then I would lov
Read more