The+Amputee

The name is plain, the sound is plain, and even the tone is plain. Flat as a newly paved road, dull as dying grass. People say it like they would the words "chair" or "brick" or "plant." It is neither obscure, nor is it common. It remains neutral, calm; a sea without waves or life. No fish, no currents, just a simple, vast emptiness of blue water. Lifeless as a chair, static and repetitive as a brick wall. If it were to come to life, it would move as slow as a plant grows, possibly slower, and without the blooming of flowers.

The name is like a blank piece of paper. The same from each side, it folds into many forms. I use none of them. It does not become an origami crane or a paper airplane; I do not fold or crease my paper into something new. The paper will show whatever you write on it, whatever you want to put on it, into it; but few bother to even try to pick up a pen.

And though my name, myself is a piece of paper, it is not blank, no, not at all. I have written and drawn on it, as is my habit when a paper is blank, and there is much space left yet to fill, much more to be defined than just four letters and a sound.

Just as paper is molded, cut from trees, the name has been shaved out of Hebrew. Hannah, the original, the tree, means grace. My parents cut off the branches and the roots and left the trunk. Trunks have never been graceful; the limbs on either side bring life to the tree, winding in and out and about, creating an intricate maze of brilliant leaves and rich bark. Without branches or roots, a tree is a stick, a lifeless object, an amputee—no arms, no legs. The extremities of the tree disappeared just as the grace disappeared from the bearer.

I grew too fast, constantly. There was never time to adjust, to develop grace, not when my height and perspective changed like the weather in Manoa Valley. Only time to grow upward, seldom outward. When you are such as I—tall, ungraceful, disorganized, distractible, a name like Anna becomes as vapid and meaningless as the way people say it. I will not sit still like a calm sea; I could not if I tried. Even with an amputee of a name, I won't be cut down to something simpler, plainer, and vastly duller than the original. Yet I will neither become the original, I will branch out like a tree, the roots there since the day I was born, branches in mazes around me, flowers of blazing colors bursting out like flames amongst leaves that contrast with a deep, dark green.