The Name Arrives Without Fanfare

March eighteenth. Tuesday. The session was unremarkable in the best sense, a full hour on the wall, the usual complaints about the same two holds, Simone making a noise of pure grievance when she came off the overhang for the third time. Afterward we were doing the thing where you sit on the mat and pretend you're stretching but you're mostly just not quite ready to leave. And she mentioned Marcus.

Not as an introduction. Not flagged. Just, Marcus thought the Tuesday slot might work for him eventually, Marcus who she goes to open studio with sometimes. That's it. The name appeared in a sentence the way names do when they've been part of someone's life long enough that they've stopped being a referential problem.

End of session. Water. The name already settling.

I did not ask a follow-up question. I'm not sure why, exactly. Maybe because the name wasn't for me. Maybe because it landed cleanly and the session was still in my body and I didn't want to turn it into a conversation.

I came home and made tea and wrote one sentence about it in my notes app. The sentence was: his name is Marcus. That's the whole sentence.

The comfortable inefficiency of leaving.

I don't know what I expected, that naming him would open a door or close one. It did neither. He's still offstage, a named offstage presence now, which is a different thing than an unnamed one. The world got one notch more specific. That's all. Sometimes that's everything.