Your heart is not a state secret. You are meant to declare allegiances. You are meant to have favourites. Write the letter. Miss the train. Stay up until dawn talking. You should be caught red-handed loving something, someone.
In America, a stranger will rename you in a single breath, and you are simply expected to come when called.
I went to eat at a busy restaurant. A young man at the front asked for my name, to mark my place in line. I gave it the weight it has carried for eight hundred years.
"Nobunaga."
He smiled, nodded, and wrote it down with great confidence. Then he read it back to me, to be sure he had honored it correctly.
"Perfect. Banana, party of one."
Banana. He had heard my name, held it a moment, and returned to me something rounder and more cheerful. To refuse the name a host gives is to refuse his welcome. I bowed. I was Banana now.
Then he handed me a small black disc, said it would "light up and buzz" when my table was ready, and turned to the next guest as though he had not just placed a living thing in my hands.
I held it in both palms, the way one holds a small sleeping beast that may wake. I found a place to stand. I waited, ready.
It woke.
It screamed. It flashed red. It leapt and shook in my hands like a captured spirit demanding release. A lesser man would have dropped it. I did not. I gripped it, steady, looked into its blinking lights, and told it, in a low voice, that its time had come. Then I carried it back to the host with both hands, the way one returns a hawk to its master.
He took it without looking and shouted across the entire room.
"BANANA! Party of one, your table's ready!"
A hundred strangers turned. I rose. I crossed that floor as Banana, spine straight, chin level, a man answering to his name. A child pointed at me. I gave the child a small bow. He had recognized me.
All through the meal they kept me. "How's it tasting, Banana?" "More water, Banana?" The check, when it came, said Banana, and thanked me for visiting. By the end the whole staff knew me. They waved as I left. "Night, Banana!"
So tell me honestly.
For eight hundred years my clan answered to one name. Tonight I answered to a fruit, calmed a screaming relic in my bare hands, and ate among people who were glad I came.
When the little disc lights up, is the table truly mine, or am I only keeping it warm for the next Banana?
Because I have already decided to return on Friday, and to ask, very humbly, for the same disc.
I consider this an argument against wealth being corrupting, an evil soul would have used the wealth create a startup company that makes a mass surveillance tool, or perhaps became a pedophile. The soul of the municipal worker burns through the wealth like your body does the flu
I wonder what my body really thinks about getting hit with a doctor approved SSRI, ADHD meds, anti-histamine, ibuprofen, and vitamin d and b12 combo at 6am washed down with black coffee.
He’s typing in a search bar, quick show him the search option he’s looking for.
Perfect. He typed the next letter that is also the next letter in the option we just showed him so take that option away and show him an option that doesn’t match at all