Names in the Wind

Yesterday I lost my name.

Not the 'H' one. Although to be honest I don't know why I refer to myself as 'H' here. The veil of anonymity isn't opaque when all of our followers are our friends. But we pretend the cloth conceals us, and that game makes me reluctant to share the name I lost. It was an internet moniker, eternally buried in the the Google graveyard. Let's refer to it as "Lia".

I invented Lia when I was twelve. It survived a move, three changes of secondary school, and a particularly horrible Objectivist phase. It even survived the edge of graduation six years after I first named myself. I used it in every single website sans the few I did not want associated with me (looking at you RealSuperPowers). Everybody online called me Lia, not H. Lia was who I was. It was my name. Yesterday an old online friend got back in touch with me. It had been three years. We had both gone to college and lost contact. When he contacted me on Gchat, his first words were 'Hi Lia'.

It was a full fifteen seconds before I remembered who 'Lia' was.

We change. That's an inescapable fact. We change and leave our old selves behind. Yet it's still jarring, deeply troubling, to leave behind your name. After all, I am not a person with H's characteristics. I am H. The two qualifiers are as different as night and justice. And for six years, I was Lia. Was. Time sliced my past self and me apart. H and Lia, now just H.

There are seven bridges of Koenigsberg. We cannot cross them all.