I COULDN'T FIND A SUITABLE NAME FOR HIM.

 

I Couldn’t Find a Suitable Name for Him

I first met him in the quietest corner of my memory, standing somewhere between dream and reality, where faces are clear but names are fragile things that slip through fingers like sand. He was not someone I knew in the ordinary sense. Not a friend, not a stranger, not even someone I could claim belonged to any category my mind was comfortable with. He simply was.

And that was the problem.

I couldn’t find a suitable name for him.

Names are powerful. They anchor people to existence, giving definition to the otherwise shapeless presence of human life. Without a name, someone feels incomplete, like a book without a title or a painting without a signature. Yet for him, every name I tried felt wrong the moment it formed in my thoughts.

At first, I tried the common ones.

I thought of calling him Daniel, because the name felt warm and reliable. It carried the comfort of familiarity, the kind of name that belongs to someone who would help you carry your groceries or fix your broken window without asking questions. But when I imagined calling him Daniel, he turned distant, like a man who would politely nod and then disappear into a crowd of people who were not meant to be remembered.

So I rejected it.

Then I tried Alexander.

Alexander felt strong. It carried the weight of history and ambition, like a man who had conquered something or was destined to conquer something. When I whispered it inside my head, I imagined him standing taller, straighter, with an expression that suggested he had places to go and battles to win.

But he was not a conqueror.

There was softness in the way he stood still. Not weakness, but patience — the patience of someone who had learned that the world moves too quickly to be fought head-on.

So Alexander did not stay.

I even tried names that were unusual.

Names that sounded like wind passing through abandoned streets or like birds calling across distant oceans. I tried Orion, thinking of stars and loneliness and vast silent spaces. But the moment I placed that name on him, he felt too far away, like something I could admire but never speak to.

And I did want to speak to him.

That was the strange part.

I did not know what I wanted from him, but I knew silence was not enough.

Sometimes I wondered whether he was real at all.

People often create figures inside their minds when they are lonely, giving them faces and stories that never existed outside imagination. I considered this possibility more than once, studying him as if he were a scientific mystery I needed to solve.

But he resisted being analyzed.

When I tried to assign him characteristics, he shifted slightly, like a shadow moving when the light changes. If I said he looked sad, I would immediately sense a stubborn calmness in him. If I imagined him wise, he would suddenly appear confused in a way that felt deeply human.

It was as if he was aware of my thoughts and politely refusing to be trapped inside them.

I began to think that maybe the problem was not finding a suitable name but understanding what kind of existence he represented in my life.

He was not heroic.

He was not tragic either.

He was somewhere in the middle, standing in that ambiguous territory where most real people live but rarely get noticed.

I remember the way he would sit sometimes — not in any particular place, because he did not belong to a physical location. But when I imagined him, he would sit by a window that was neither inside nor outside a building, watching something I could never see.

I once asked him, silently, what he wanted to be called.

He did not answer immediately.

For a long time, there was only the sound of imagined wind moving through nonexistent leaves. Then he said something that surprised me.

“Do I need a name?”

The question unsettled me.

Because I realized I had been trying to name him not for his sake but for mine. I wanted the comfort of labeling him so I could place him somewhere inside my mental world and stop feeling the uncertainty he brought.

But he continued speaking.

“You give names to things you wish to control or understand,” he said. “But maybe I am meant to remain slightly beyond your understanding.”

I did not like that answer.

Not because it was wrong, but because it felt too close to truth.

Still, I kept searching.

I tried names from different languages, believing maybe the right word existed somewhere else in the world.

I experimented with French names that sounded elegant and melancholy. I tried Japanese names that carried poetic rhythm. I even tried old forgotten names that historians write in dusty books.

None of them stayed.

Every time I selected one, I felt an invisible resistance — not dramatic or loud, just a quiet feeling that said: Not this one.

It was like trying on clothes for someone who refused to wear anything you offered.

Days passed in my imagination.

I began noticing that when I thought about him, the world around me became quieter. Not lonely quiet, but the kind of quiet that happens when you are trying to listen carefully to something small and important.

I wondered if he was lonely.

But when I asked him that, he shook his head.

“Loneliness requires comparison,” he said. “I do not compare myself to others.”

The sentence stayed with me for a long time.

There was something unsettlingly peaceful about his way of existing. He was not driven by ambition, fear, or social expectation. He simply occupied a space in my thoughts as naturally as breathing.

And still, I couldn’t find a suitable name for him.

Eventually, I stopped trying to force one.

Instead, I began observing him without labels.

I noticed that he smiled in a way that was not fully visible but could be felt. His presence felt like late afternoon sunlight when the day is tired but not yet ready to end. He was neither excitement nor sadness but something softer — a quiet continuity between them.

Sometimes he spoke about things I never consciously thought about.

He spoke about forgotten conversations, about roads that people walk without remembering why, about moments when human beings almost understand each other but choose not to ask the final question.

I suspected that if I gave him a name, I might also be giving him boundaries.

And perhaps he preferred not to have them.

One evening, when the sky inside my imagination was turning dark blue, I asked him one last question.

“If I never name you, will you disappear?”

He looked at me for a long time.

Not with sadness. Not with approval either. Just with the patient gaze of someone who has seen countless versions of the same question.

“I exist as long as you allow me to remain without forcing me into certainty,” he said.

I thought about that answer.

Maybe names are not always about identification. Sometimes they are about comfort, about making the unknown feel safe enough to touch.

But he was not meant to be fully safe or fully known.

He was meant to stay slightly mysterious, like the feeling you get when you almost remember a childhood dream but wake up before seeing its ending.

So I stopped searching.

I decided that perhaps the most honest statement I could make about him was simple.

I couldn’t find a suitable name for him.

And maybe that was not a failure.

Maybe it was the only name he was ever meant to have — a sentence rather than a word, a thought rather than a label, a quiet acknowledgment that some presences in life are not meant to be captured by language.

Because some beings, whether real or imagined, are not carried by names.

They are carried by the feeling that they leave behind when they stand silently inside the spaces of our mind, waiting patiently without demanding definition.

And he is still there.

Nameless.

Not forgotten.

Just unnamed.