The Importance of Names

On the edge of a cliff one Spring in Maryland the wind was calm and the air was pleasantly cool, smelling of anticipation for humidity but being in the sweet spot of not being quite there yet. The morning was just beginning, and the Woman sat by an art installation reading I propose that we meet here once a year until one of us can’t or won’t. She put a cigarette to her lips and gently inhaled.

“That’ll kill you, you know.” The Man said, sitting down beside her on the cliffs edge and leaning back on his palms.

“And I suppose you’ll never die.” She responded. They sat in silence, looking over the horizon as the sun was just peaking over the cliffs in the distance and making colorful divots in the small lakes below them. “What, do you make a habit of sitting down beside and subsequently criticizing strangers at art exhibitions?”

“Life’s too short.” He responded ambiguously. “Especially for you, if you keep that habit up.”

“I’m sitting on the edge of a cliff. Do I seem like the risk-averse type?”

He shrugged. “You seem like the lonely type.” They sat in silence a few moments more, gazing out. “So, it’s a cool idea, right?” The Man lifted his hand momentarily to point at the art installation closest to them. “I propose that we meet here once a year until one of us can’t or won’t.”

“Requires a little bit of stability.” She responded.

“What do you mean?”

“I don’t know about you, but I hope I’m not here in a year’s time.”

“I hope you mean that geographically, not in the darker sense.” At this, the Woman chuckled. “What’s your name?”

“Hmm,” the Woman responded, “I’m not sure if I’m ready to give that information up.”

“Then I suppose I can’t get your phone number either.”

“I wouldn’t count on it.” The Man found this amusing, falling silent once more. The Woman finished her cigarette, and the Man watched her do so, examining her features. Blue eyes much more reflective of the sunrise than he imagined his own brown eyes to be. Perhaps a few years younger than him, mid-thirties, but she gave off the naivety of a child.

“Good.” The Man said.

“What’s good?”

“I don’t want to ask you out anyway.”

“That makes two of us.” The Woman had retorted just as quickly, but something in his tone had piqued her curiosity – he had not said it bitterly, as a man who had just been rejected; rather lightly, breezily, as if his words had meant exactly what they had been constructed to mean, with no hidden subtext and no animosity. “So what’s your deal?”

“I have no deal.” The Man said, and she believed him. “I just wanted to sit down on a cliffside, next to a complete stranger who looked alone, and watch the sun rise with her.”

Three Years Later

“What a coincidence that we keep meeting like this.” The Man said, sitting down next to the Woman on the cliffside and smiling.

“Hi!” They embraced warmly. “You’re late. The sun’s up.”

“And you’ve finished your morning cigarette.”

“You know me so well.”

“And yet, still not your name.”

“What’s a name worth?” The Woman responded, looking out blankly into middle distance. “Not much.”

They sat for a few moments in silence, as was their established custom. They each enjoyed the lack of pretense, not needing to be anything or put forward any new ideas; rather, just sit in each other’s company, as if entirely alone.

“How was this past year for you?” The Man asked eventually.

“Oh, you know,” the Woman said, “the same as the one before, and the one before that.”

“Still living your same old, sheltered existence then?” The Woman nodded, smirking.

“And I presume you’re still travelling the world looking for a purpose you’ll never find?”

“We’re like Vladimir and Estragon.”

“Oh, and he’s cultured!”

“I never said I didn’t read.” The Man said. “Besides, I wouldn’t exactly call 1950’s absurdist literature ‘cultured’.”

“What would you call it, then?”

“Thirteen years in the American public education system.” The Woman cocked her head, as if to say, fair enough. They understood these little gestures, idiosyncrasies, instinctively, as if having known each other for their whole lives. The Man shot glances sideways, studying her from the distance he intuitively knew she needed. Yet nothing about her, not her clothes, her jewelry, the position of her hands holding each other lightly in her lap, suggested anything identifiable. He knew her, very well at that, yet still felt as if she was entirely a mystery.

“Next year I hope not to be here.” The Woman said, knowing she would be.

“You know I get nervous when you say that.”

“Oh, relax,” responded the Woman with less warmth than had been given to her, “I’m not going to throw myself off this cliff or anything. I just mean I want to be away. Away from here.”

“Do I smell that bad?”

She playfully hit him. “Shut up.” This was one of the only times he would see her be light-hearted in the same way he was – in the way he knew how best to relate to her. “I want to see the world, like you have.”

“It’s overrated.”

“Only people who’ve had the privilege of travelling can afford to underestimate its value.”

The Man considered this for a moment. “What keeps you here?”

“I’ve told you before,” the Woman said, recalling a similar conversation they’d had the year before. “Money. Family. Job.”

“You should pull a Chris McCandless and just up and leave some day.”

“And then die from eating the wrong plant? No thanks.”

“Ah,” said the Man, “so really, it’s fear keeping you in place.” The Woman furrowed her brow, trying to think of something to combat this statement. “Your first response wasn’t that suddenly leaving would be incredibly irresponsible, because it would be. Your first response was fear that you wouldn’t know how to sustain yourself without the same civilization that you’ve grown up in. You’re afraid of your own shortcomings.”

“Jesus Christ, when did you become a psychology major? I don’t remember this level of analysis last year.”

“You’re deflecting.”

“You’re annoying.”

They fell silent, each smiling.

Five Years Later

The Man pulled up in his car to a vacant lot on a cliffside. The air was cool, like morning Spring air is, but there was a stiffness to it afforded by a lack of life surrounding him. He opened and shut the car door, and the sound echoed across the canyon like a coin going down a pipe. The installation, which had stood strong for seven years, now had disappeared, leaving nothing in its wake but two empty holes in the ground like abandoned ant hills. He walked to the edge of the cliffside once more, for the last time, but for what seemed like just the first.

He had missed the sunrise again, a fact for which he internally chastised himself. He wondered if the Woman once and for all had decided she wasn’t going to wait around for him if he’d kept showing up late, and had decided to leave before he even got there, this year. He subsequently noted the absence of the installation. He whispered the words: I propose that we meet here once a year until one of us can’t or won’t. Until one of us can’t or won’t. Until one of us can’t or won’t.

The peak of heat at midday passed him by slowly, crawling in its humidity, lazy and hot. He hadn’t moved, his palms burnt into the ground behind him, eyes staring out into middle distance. He avoided looking down – not because of a fear of heights, but because some part of him imagined that he’d see her body there strewn on the rocks below, or floating in the lake. It was a dark thought, and one without much justification, yet he couldn’t shake the feeling that this break in the annual pattern indicated something much more severe. Or perhaps he had just wanted to know she was real, even if not actually alive – to know that he hadn’t been alone, that he hadn’t dreamt her up, that those times where they embraced, the one time she hit him playfully, were real and true.

He considered that perhaps, given that the installation had disappeared, she had assumed their unspoken agreement had ended and she could be freed from the bounds of this cliffside, once and for all, freed from returning to it year after year. That thought at once made him feel like just another aspect of her sheltered life, a burden to her, despite their extremely limited connection. He played a number of stories in his mind.

She had come to the cliffside at sunrise, and after having her morning cigarette, tossed herself off it. She’d always emitted a sense of strained melancholy, a desire to exert whatever control she could. If she could not escape in a geographical sense, she would choose to escape in the physical. Then again, perhaps the same fear that kept her rooted in place would have stopped her.

Alternatively, perhaps the story was lighter: she had met someone, had a child with him, moved away. She would have had a son, he imagined. It wasn’t logical, but she seemed like the kind of woman to have a son. More: she seemed like the kind of woman to have a child to hold on to an extension of her partner, for any deeper connection she was too defensive to ask for in words, but so desperately needed. She would know that this was not a good reason to have a child, but she would anyway.

Perhaps the cigarette smoking finally got to her – went in to see the doctor for a sore throat and came out with six months to live. It wasn’t inconceivable, even at her relatively young age. In his mind’s eye, he saw her lungs shrivel into prunes, deflated, turn black and fall out of her chest cavity.

Most likely (though the logical conclusion which the Man most wanted to avoid, for some reason), she had finally left the city, the state, the country, of her own accord. He couldn’t quite pinpoint why his mind had jumped to such dark stories before this one. Maybe he, too, had internalized a belief in her shortcomings. Maybe he also believed her naivety would get the best of her – for all the times out on the cliffside, looking out across the lakes for more – independence, perhaps – she would ultimately be one of those people to die one mile from where she was born. Lack of worldly knowledge and a fear of the unknown mixed with an ardent (albeit idealistic) desire to escape into a bigger pond, he decided, was a dangerous and painful combination of personality traits.

But without a name, any identifiable features, no number or email address, there was no way to know the truth. He could not simply look for obituaries, social media profiles, public appearances. There was no footprint which he could track, barcode he could scan, button to press which would bring her to him. He could neither confirm nor deny any of these stories; she was a woman with free will, free will which she had exerted to stray from the habits which kept her locked in place. The story, instead, was his to finish for the purposes of closure. She was now simply reduced to a character in his mind, a figment of the past, something illusory and ephemeral, a fleeting connection now gone.

And as he sat and thought, the moon rose, up from behind the same mountain peaks from which the sun had emerged and illuminated her face all those years previously. As he finally got up to leave, for the last time, he let his eyes drift down and noticed the moon making the same pale divots in the lakes below, carving the dark water with highlights of silver, controlling its ripples and valleys. There was nothing in the water now but a big, black, emptiness. He got into his car and pulled away.