In English my name means loving. It means strong girl. In the bible Breanna means daughter of god. It is like the number 18. A bright, soft, deep blue color. It is the sound of the ocean washing up on shore on a brisk morning in Belize. 

Breanna is 7 letters. If pronounced correctly, it slides off your tongue. like a slippery piece of ice. If not, it sounds like a pile of boulders falling down a hill. Breánna they say. Like the first “a” is the most important letter in the name. The N’s in my name are like twins. There are 2 of them, but they sound like there is 1. 

My name means bright, like the color yellow. Like the warm sun on a summer day. My name means warm, like the feeling your body gets in the last minutes of being in a tanning bed. The way your skin feels after falling asleep under the sun. 

It was a student in my mom's class when she first started teaching. She wrote it on a bright yellow post-it note after 3rd period of AP biology she said. Put it in the bottom of a desk drawer for safekeeping. 

 She brought it home to my father that night. Smiling,  she handed it to him without context. My father thought it was my mom's way of telling him she was pregnant. 

“This is what I want to name our daughter,” she said. “I want to try to have a girl.”

My mom says it reminds her of a beautiful sunny day on the ocean. It reminds her how she used to walk the warm sanded beach with her own mom. Hand in hand. They went everywhere imaginable together. From the clear blue oceans in the Bahamas to the crowded beaches in Florida. The smell of salt that the ocean gave off.

In public, at school, at church, they announce my name funny. I’ve accepted it. The way it's spelled out is made out of an unbreakable piece of metal or a squishy ball that has no right shape. The way the name looks is like the Arc de Triomphe in Paris. Curvy and shaped like an N. They don’t roll together. They are a bunch of letters mashed together. Brenna some say. 

I would like to change my name to just Bre. A simpler version of me. Calmer oceans. A softer color blue. Soft sand like the kind my mom walked on with her mom. A breakable piece of metal when I walk into school on the first day. Like one boulder falling down a hill, instead of a cluster of them.