Your Name by Anita Morozova

The scariest thing about vanishing

isn’t that the world forgets you, but that you look in the mirror and realize that you’ve forgotten yourself.

Lately, an unsettling numbness had taken root inside her. Sitting in her usual crowded cafe, the world felt entirely out of focus. The frantic clatter of porcelain, the aromatic steam of green tea, and the vibrant hum of conversation around her didn't feel as real. It was just a wall of distant, flat static. She had everything a person was supposed to want, yet when she reached inside for her own identity, she met a hollow, echoing cavern. Her true essence felt like a word left on the very tip of her tongue: submerged, unreachable, missing. She desperately needed to feel something raw again, to remember what actually made her heart race.

So, she went looking for her “name”.

But instead of searching inward, she looked outward, collecting identities like cheap souvenirs. She threw herself into new crowds, mimicking their passions and adopting their worldviews. She changed her clothes, her vocabulary, her habits. With every new role she tried on, a strange, frantic energy kept her moving, telling herself she was finally getting closer to the truth.

She didn't realize that every time she painted on a new mask, she was scrubbing away a layer of the canvas underneath.

By the time she stopped to take a breath, the masks had taken over. She sat alone in her room, reaching for her guitar, hoping the familiar wood and steel might remind her hands of who she used to be. She pressed her fingers to the frets and strummed, but her mind couldn't conjure a single melody that felt genuinely hers. Instead, her fingers moved like an automaton's, tracing a cold, unfamiliar chord progression. She began to hum, trying to anchor herself, but the tune twisted into something dark and haunting. The chords spiraled downward into a suffocating rhythm, and as she sang, the lyrics spilled out of her like a grim, self-inflicted prophecy: “You eventually will be eaten by yourself.”