ID

Second syllable of what was once my name, now used only by the bank, by the government, and by certain few women who insist on it: you are like the necktie I long ago forgot how to fasten. No, scratch that. You are like that great bulb of an Adam’s apple I sported before my neck widened and absorbed it. I and D, you make me trochaic. You turn me into my ancestor, that quiet boy I suspect that I, as a Dave, would’ve hated, because he thought he was special, and not in the short-bus kind of way. A David. God’s favorite sociopath, going buck-wild in front of the ark: no David is ever quite free of that chaos, that cauldron, that id.

But Dave? A name without promise or poetry. Every Tom, Dick and Harry is named Dave now, you say — but that’s precisely the point. It was only when I freed myself of the i.d. that I started to discover who all I might become.