There are questions which you’ve answered so often before that the answers you feel are the only ones available become your permanent salvation. You don’t know a world which begins from different answers, a world which accepts other possible options and thus, when you catch glimpses of it occasionally, it leaves you with thoughts you’re otherwise accustomed to overlook. For instance, “What is your name?” and there’s only one answer to it, the name you were assigned by your family, a word others have tasted more often than you have.
“Venus”, I sometimes muster the courage to say. The reactions which follow are definitely worth it.
I read somewhere that every single person you meet in your life knows something you do not. I thought a lot about it and came up with an entirely new idea of my own- every single person you meet in your life knows or has something they don’t need but you do. Somehow, you do. The way my best friend’s eyes sparkle when she’s telling me an incident which she experienced, or found funny. She doesn’t really need that sparkle to live as much as I do. How my mom and dad fight playfully very randomly. Now, of course, it isn’t a necessity for them but it is for me.
Similarly, when an old flame suggested I call myself Venus over the hottest planet (it was meant to be a cheesy pickup line), it felt like I had found a part of myself that I had been looking for ever since forever. Like the word, “Venus” was made to make me its own and it wasn’t because of the seemingly hot image I have of myself in my optimistic mental space, but because Venus is, in Roman Mythology, the Goddess of Love.
Love is what I live for.
Love is what we all live for.
The name doesn’t sound foreign to me. I’ve made it mine and the fact that, for once, I’m more familiar with its sweetness than the world is, makes me feel closer to my entirety.
So, hi, my name is Venus. And, I’m a 17 year old teenager in search of questions which have no preexisting answers. Questions so beautiful and so free, they cannot be answered in words, and I wish I am able to befriend them and travel with them to the places in this cosmos which haven’t yet been unvelied.
Tell me now, what is your name?
