I said yes more — to going out at night, to dating, and to doing things that were edgy for me (don’t laugh), such as having more than one drink. I began posting street art in Philadelphia. One night when I stuck a poem to the concourse that leads to the Broad Street Line, a transit policeman hastened toward me. I felt my heart quicken and my cheeks warm. But instead of reprimanding me, he said: “You know you’re not supposed to do that. I’ll let it slide, though, because I like to tag, too.” As we exchanged Instagram handles, all I could think was: Lauren would never do this.
When the three weeks were up, and I told my mother I wanted to start the paperwork to change my name, I could hear her choke up over the phone. She said:
“Lauren, I always saw you as seizing the meaning of your name. You are the laurel crowned.”
That’s when I first understood what Lauren really meant — not the etymological definition of it, but how I, alive, had fleshed the name out.
When someone calls your name, you hear them as they see you. You hear how they hold you (or don’t) in their voicings of you.
The way my mother uttered my name got to me. I had heard her say it throughout the years, and in varying tones. I heard the phonemes, the music of her saying my name as a child, when I was beginning to forge who I was, in the stories we read before bed. I heard her scowl, justifiably, at me as a teenager. I heard her now, a voice I know, as someone who knows me.
I decided to keep my name because it was already mine.
When I heard my mother answer the phone on the first ring or my grandmother sing “Lauren” up the stairs of my childhood home on school mornings, I heard their love for me, which was not always perfect, but it had become something beautiful — a glittering constellation that I cannot hear in any other word. When I hear my fiancé pronounce “Loren,” when I hear my stepson say “Lauren” in his treble lilt, when I hear my father say my name in his New Haven accent, I hear myself and I know myself.
My name has come to signify not only my identity, but also the love from those who said it during important moments in my life. I could not lose Lauren.
Tiffi is an arbitrary set of letters. She is also someone I never really was.
But her hair, her wild hair — I decided I had to keep it.
Lauren DePino writes about love and mortality and is working on a memoir.
Source : Nytimes
