Clear Blue

by Elamimax

Yeah

You're doing better than you think you are

I would find, later, that the name-choosing was a tradition held by both those living on the islands above, as in the myriad settlements of the Marina below. It was a way for those who came of age to decide their future for themselves. 

Names, I would learn, were not as simple as they had always been to me. There was none of that “first name given by parents, last name belonging to father” nonsense, which had been confusing to me even back then. Why, if feminism and equality had made such leaps forward, was passing on the name through patrilineage still considered the norm? Convenience? Habit? Surely we were smart enough to come up with something else. 

Well… I say ‘we’. Modern Western countries, specifically. I figured colonialism was to blame for me thinking it was the norm. Presumably the British were involved somehow. Spain, as I recalled, allowed people two surnames, and there were a couple of native aboriginal tribes in Canada that I distinctly remembered being matrilineal. 

We could do better, was my point. 

And the people here did. The Last Name, not passed down from father to child, but names that indicated the larger family unit. A clan, if you will. It was a name that told people not who you belonged to or who your father was, but where you came from. With a last name, people would know the village that raised you and who you knew. Aria’s last name was Chrysos. So was that of her parents. Like, all of them. 

Then, her Birth Name. When born, a child was given a name. It wasn’t meant to label you for the rest of your life, because parents have never had good taste. My deepest sympathies to all the Herberts and the Eugenes. Couldn’t be me, though. But it was a promise. A promise of the kind of life your parents wished you. Strength. Calm. Beauty. Grace. Joy or resilience. Creativity. Not literally, of course, but names mean things even when they don’t. Names are important. And parents like promising things. 

Some people, Aria said, would wear their birth name proudly later into life, either as a promise back to their parents – “Yes, I intend to fulfill the promise you made me” – or just because they liked the sound of it. Aria had kept it, but didn’t like telling people. It was something she let her parents and grandparents call her, but it was diminutive. 

There was the Calling Name, what people who you didn’t know called you. How you wanted to be introduced as. It seemed to take both the role of honorific and pronouns, in a way? It said something about you without saying everything about you. Aria’s was, well, Aria. That name was usually derived from the last one. 

The True Name. The name you chose for yourself when you decided to be not what your parents hoped for you, but who you hoped you’d be. A name that brought you joy or comfort. A name that took some years to find, trying out one after the other, until you landed on the one that you wanted burned across your soul in ten foot tall letters. 

That was the one I had just chosen. 

I had, in truth, chosen it a long time ago. It had always been plain for me to see when I closed my eyes. It was the name I secretly hoped I’d see when I got mail. It was the name I didn’t dare sign letters with and dearly wanted to. It was the name I wanted people to think of when they looked at me, though they never would. 

I would have never been that name. That person. But now, floating weightlessly, a gorgeous blue dress clinging to me, hair playing in the currents, in Aria’s arms, perhaps I could be. Could be allowed to. Could be named. 

Even if saying the name was a sentence. A condemnation of the life I’d had. A realization that going back was now impossible. Going back would be lethal. It would destroy me. If I woke up now, life would be…

Not over. But hard. Really, really hard. If I went back now, I would lose my shit, and then I’d have to spend a couple of weeks just trying to get it together long enough to go see a doctor, and I’d have to avoid talking to my mom for the rest of my life, and scrounge up the money, maybe beg the campaign manager… it would be hard. But weirdly, maybe a little easier, too. A weight off my back, a weight now in my hands. Visible. Something to work with. If it was all a hallucination. A dream in a coma.

But I did not wish to go back. I wanted to stay here, in her arms, floating in the darkness, watching the sun set with her, eating perfect dishes with her and dancing under the lamplight with her until our feet gave out and our stomachs and faces hurt from laughing and smiling. 

“I want to stay here,” I whispered to Aria, and then everything went dark. 

Ironically, there wasn’t a huge change from where I’d been before. The transition was almost seamless. Floating in the dark waters to floating in unconsciousness. I wasn’t usually this lucid, but, well, I wasn’t usually able to breathe underwater, either. Things change. I did worry for a moment if that breathing was going to be a problem, but there was no point in fretting about it now. There were other things to be concerned about. I wasn’t alone, here in the darkness. There was something in here with me. 

“Well, yes,” the darkness said. “There usually is.”

“Who are you?” I asked. 

“Oh. You, obviously. I’m your subconscious. The part of you that knows what’s going on when you don’t,” the darkness said. There was a slightly contemptuous tone to the voice.

“Ah,” I said. I wasn’t sure if I should believe the voice. For obvious reasons, I didn’t like being told what I was thinking, although there was some leeway when it was my own mind telling me what I was thinking. 

“Exactly,” the darkness said. “And what I’m telling you is that it’s time to wake up. You said the name, but it’s not too late to take it back. This isn’t real. This is all in your head, and when you wake up from whatever coma we are in, you’ll be able to forget. Move on with your life without all the pain and hardship that accepting any of this will bring. It’ll all have just been a dream.”

“But I don’t want it to be,” I said. “I want to be here. I can be happy here.”

“What you want,” the voice replied, “doesn’t really matter, does it? You make the best of the situation you’re in. That’s all you – that’s all anyone can do.”

“I don’t think I like you very much.”

“I’m not the villain here. I’m not here to tell you that I’m going to take away what makes you happy, or that you don’t deserve good things. I’m just the part of you that’s… pragmatic. I make sure you don’t lose yourself in unsustainable flights of fancy or whatever. To remind you that the theme park has a closing time. That the longer you stay down here, the more painful waking up is going to be. And I don’t like hurting any more than you do.”

“That doesn’t sound very subconscious.”

“I’m the part of you that keeps you safe, dumbass. Subconsciously. This conversation isn’t really happening, either. You’re just manifesting the most realistic part of yourself as a voice so that you can finally confront what you’ve been afraid of this whole time: that this isn’t real, that you are going to wake up any minute now. And when that happens, we can’t have a repeat of The Incident. Not again.”

“That was bad.”

“Yes,” the void said. “It was. It fucking sucked. It hurt like hell. The desire for the pain to stop nearly killed us back then, and I’m not letting you put us in that position again. No matter how ‘independent’ you think you are nowadays.”

“What the fuck is that supposed to mean?” My subconscious was starting to annoy me.

“It means, and again, you know this, I’m literally you, that you’re kind of just coasting along because you don’t know what to do with your life. And don’t get me wrong, that’s a good thing. It’s a safety you wouldn’t have otherwise. That nebulous nothing is your, it’s our safety net. Better that than having everything taken from you.”

“What do you mean? Where are you going with this?”

“I’m saying that you aren’t doing anything with your life, but this way you don’t get hurt. I’m saying I’m scared, which means you’re scared. When you wake up, we need to be able to breathe, not constantly live in fear of what happens when you try to reach for things that are impossible, of what happened last time.”

“I don’t care,” I said.

“What.”

“I don’t care. Not anymore.”

“Well, clearly you do. Or I wouldn’t be here,” the darkness said. “You can’t just go ‘I’m not scared and I don’t care’ to your own subconscious and expect to be believed at face value. That’s not how this works. I know you’re still scared.”

“No, you misunderstand me. I do not care that I am scared.”

“Why are you talking like them? You know they’re not real. You sound ridiculous.”

“Because it gives me strength. Because I do not care about sounding ridiculous.” 

“But–”

“No,” I said. “I don’t want to hear it. I am scared, but I am also me, and I am here, and I am real, and if I am, that means you are, and if you are then that means they are, in some capacity, real. And that means the name is real, you cowardly bastard.”

“Hey, I’m just trying to help you here.”

“No, you’re not. You’re trying to lock me in a cycle of absence. Of being a passenger, a bit player in my own play, from here to the grave, never having lived, because it is scary and difficult and because you think being afraid gives you the right to non-existence! I reject you! You’re not my subconscious, you’re not any conscience or consciousness at all, you are my unwillingness to act in the face of oblivion and to accept it without struggle and I reject you!”

“You’re being dramatic.”

“You’re god damn right I’m being dramatic! I am asserting my existence, you coward! Let me wake up, then! Let me face the world that I left behind, and I’ll face it as my own god damn self, and if it kills me then let it kill me with my name, my real name, my True Name, on my own lips!”

“Fine,” the darkness said. “I think it’s time we woke up anyway.”

The weightlessness began to fade. In a dream, a dream can feel real, realer than reality, right up until you wake up and it all begins to feel like fog, drifting away to reveal the world under the light of consciousness. My limbs felt heavy, like I’d been asleep for a very long time. There was a figure standing over me, harsh light beaming down at me. 

Reality faced me as I blinked a few times. I was ready to face it, now.

“Thank heavens,” Aria said, the sun high above. “I was worried for a moment you wouldn’t wake at all.”

I internally glared at what I imagined to be a retreating shadow. “Don’t look at me,” I imagined it to say, “I didn’t see this coming either.”

“I’m here,” I said with a smile. “I’m okay.”

“And I’m glad you are,” Aria said, taking my hand in hers. She squeezed it gently. “I was worried about you, Nova.”