A word unspoken—
Not lost, but waiting,
Like a letter never sent.
The Name That Was Never Mine
I don’t have a middle name.
Or maybe I do. Maybe I had one once, before it was lost somewhere between generations, between borders, between the things my family chose to remember and the things they let slip into silence.
As a child, I asked my mother why. Why no name in the middle, no second thread woven into my identity. She looked at me the way people do when there’s an answer too complicated to give to a child.
“Some things don’t fit in between.”
I didn’t understand what she meant.
Years later, I would.
The Name That Almost Was
There was a name my grandfather wanted to give me. A name that belonged to a man I would never meet. Someone who fought, who left home with a promise to return and never did. A name that carried the weight of history, the kind of history people don’t talk about at dinner tables.
My father didn’t want that for me.
“Let him be his own person,” he had said.
So they left the space empty. A quiet refusal to carry ghosts into a new life.
The Things We Do Not Pass Down
Names are more than sounds.
They are the echoes of old stories, the weight of someone else’s victories and regrets, passed down like heirlooms. Some people wear their names with pride. Others, with resignation. Some names are cages, others are keys.
Mine is a space in between.
A blank slate. A breath between syllables. A question never fully answered.
And maybe that’s a kind of freedom.
To be untethered from the past. To be a person who does not carry the burden of someone else’s unfinished story.
But sometimes, I wonder.
Would I have been different, had I carried that name? Would it have changed the way I walk through the world? Would I have lived up to it, or would it have been too heavy to bear?
Wabi-Sabi and the Beauty of the Unnamed
Wabi-sabi tells us that imperfection is beauty. That absence is not emptiness—it is possibility.
A cracked bowl is not broken—it is more interesting.
A faded photograph is not useless—it is a portal.
A name left unspoken is not missing—it is waiting to be written.
Maybe I was never supposed to have a middle name.
Maybe I was meant to fill that space myself.
Lessons From a Name That Was Never Given
- You are not the weight of what came before.
- Some things are left empty for a reason.
- You do not need a name to belong.
- The past is not a chain, unless you let it be.
- Your story is still being written. Choose the words wisely.
The Name I Carry, the One I Create
I have no middle name.
But I have all the words I have ever spoken.
All the things I have built, broken, and built again.
All the mistakes, the moments, the people who have shaped me.
Maybe that is enough.
life 
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