Nameless | Teen Ink

Nameless

May 14, 2010
By plathfan864 SILVER, Mountain Lakes, New Jersey
plathfan864 SILVER, Mountain Lakes, New Jersey
9 articles 0 photos 1 comment

Favorite Quote:
&quot;What I fear most, I think, is the death of imagination... the poverty of life without dreams is too horrible to imagine&quot;<br /> -Sylvia Plath


I am nameless. I have not always been this way, I mean, I assume at some point I did have a name, but not anymore. If you were to ask me for my name, I have long forgotten it. For years, I have been just another member of the human race, just another person that you pass on the street. No one cares about my story, who I am, where I’m going or where I have come from. If you looked at me, you would see just another person who will eventually be forgotten, and even if I am remembered, is remembered without a face, much less a name.

I believe at some point to someone I had a name, and I might even still have one to someone somewhere. Someone who has taken the hectic world out of their lives and actually bothered to take the time to collect the names and faces of people whose acquaintance they made that are worth remembering. But it is my belief that there are very few of those people. In the modern world today, people like that are few and far between.

In this society, it is more common to hear myself, and others, referred to as “you”, “him”, “her”, “he” or “she”. When that happens, I feel my heart sinking in my chest, especially if it is someone I am close to, or whom I thought I was close to. They have actually not taken the time to remember my name, and they are putting me with the nameless many that they pass every day. I am not given a number, just a pronoun, which, depending on which one is used, may not even give me a gender. The modern society has done a wonderful job of making sure that the masses cannot be easily discerned from one another. They treat each of us like they would a piece of gum on the sidewalk: insignificant, boring, something you can just step on as easily as if you are walking on the pavement.

I would love to know what genius first came up with the system of slowly stripping people of their identities. It is true, there are people that have been able to create a way for their name to be memorable (for good or bad deeds) but most of us are nameless. I, as I have said, am nameless. The name that I have for myself is my life’s work. I chose my name with my work. Every word I put down on the page is another part of my name. People can read it and wonder who it is, who’s story shows up on the page and never know it was me. I have faded into the grayness that is the world around me, the blank world that shows no person distinction, almost like a cartoon.

We are nameless. We are a society that has been beaten to the point of non-distinction. No one here knows who we are, or what our history is. We have no name, no number, nothing that makes us special. We simply fade into the vast fog that is the world, and no one knows a thing about us. We are the society of the invisible, the faceless. When you see us on the street, you walk right by us, or even right through us, without even knowing we are there. You don’t care. All you care about is you, and your name, and making it known. But we live in a world where that is impossible; you have made it so. You have us so that we are invisible, forgotten. Not even worthy of a number, definitely not worthy of a name.
We are nameless.
I am nameless.



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