A story drawn from a single session · Written by Jordan Soliday · Epic Ordinary
Viji
There is a name she has been circling her whole life. Viji. Her parents braided it from their own, Vida and Jing, a mother and a father folded into four small letters, sacred as a wound that never quite closes. A Filipino thing. Her sister was offered the same name and handed it back, untouched. I don't want any of it. So it stayed with Sarah, unworn, warm and waiting, a coat she kept, uncertain she would ever grow into.
Only three people have ever called her Viji and meant it. Once, in Hawaii, a friend she had not seen in ten years called it across a crowded room, and the syllables found her before her mind could argue. VG? She turned. She always turns. The name reaches her in the soft place behind the ribs, where weather gathers before it breaks.
Sarah lives on the outside, sun on skin. Viji lives within, down in the dark wet interior where the realest things grow.
She is taking back her old name too, Boloico, the one she carried before the marriage. She asked her three daughters first. They are her guides, her heartbeat, the small fierce committee of her becoming. When they said that's cool, Mom it landed like a blessing, like a door swinging open on a room she had forgotten was hers.
She knows something about lines. Her parents drew them once to keep people out, against women in the pulpit, against men who loved men, clean borders inked in the name of God. She learned the drawing from them and turned the blade the other way. When her sister and brother-in-law in Hawaii would not let her friend Kurt through the door, wary of his life, she stood in the gap. Welcome him or I will not come. She does not say such things lightly; family runs in her like blood, like marrow. But she held the line until it broke them open. After twenty-four hours with Kurt, they loved him. Now the children call him Uncle Kurt. Now her sister and brother-in-law tell her she is not allowed back to Hawaii without him. Now, if she and Sam are gone, it is Kurt who keeps her daughters. I could not do life without you, she told him. Her parents, too, have grown soft and wide with the years; they welcome Kurt and his husband warmly now. The line she drew became a gushing river. Why choose to live behind shitty lines when drawing life from the ocean is an option?
Her mother is a Southern Belle with the fire banked low, a woman who forgot herself somewhere along the road and never went back to ask why. So Sarah draws her out through dares. Dare you to walk four blocks alone. Dare you to cuss at me. Come on, Ma. Dare ya. She is coaxing the flame back up out of the body that gave her half a name, blowing on a coal she knows is still warm under the ash.
Sarah does not need to arrive because she works the in-between. She is a death doula. She walks the living into the dark for what the daylight will not give them. Now she is doing it to herself. Living toward the name that is a long-kept coat. Becoming, in plain sight of her daughters, blistering a little at the edges, the woman she has been the whole time.
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