My name is Beket. That’s my first name, and my last. My mother was going to name me Becky, after some character in a novel she loved, but when she saw how silent I was as a baby (she said it was like I was observing a vigil, or practicing solemnity at a funeral), she changed Becky to Beket. She thought the quality of my silences deserved a name like Beket. My mother was a failed writer. Her words, not mine. I’d say lapsed writer would be a more accurate description, as she had been a devout disciple of the craft until her mid-thirties and then abandoned the tradition. It was in my pre-pubescent years that my silences began filling up with words. A vocabulary tonally tinged with insolence, seethe, snide—whatever became one of my heat-seeking dismissals regulated by varying measures of apathy and snark. I became a whatever girl. Mostly on the inside though. For me, most of my life took place on the inside. I didn’t understand outside, or my life that took place outside. It seemed like everyone was in a show, that everyone had agreed to be on this show, though I had never heard or seen anyone agree outright (and no one ever admitted that they were part of a show), and I had never been asked nor had I agreed to be on this show. It just happened. And kept on happening. A sense of unspoken agreements amounting to serialized reality. And the show wasn’t even that good. It seemed you could say or be or do anything and it didn’t matter because you weren’t really what you said or did or were. Hi, my name is Beket, and I love taking long walks off short piers, moonlight in the snow, tangerines, and deep puzzling silences. Cue canned applause. That’s often how I felt when I saw myself outside myself talking and interacting and what-not. I never knew my father, but that’s no big deal. No one knows their fathers anymore—absentee fathers are beyond cliché at this point. Father has to be one of the most expendable roles and titles. Fathers belong in folk tales and sentimental pop songs and drawn-out trauma therapy sessions. My mother used to say when a man’s dick has left a woman he becomes a little boy again. In growing soft, he grows young again. Men are only men for the duration of their hard-ons. I know what you’re thinking (because, believe me, I have thought it too), what kind of mother talks to her daughter like this, but I suspect it was the quality of my silences which allowed my mother to feel free to share in this manner. That’s just a theory. I have many, most of which I keep to myself thank you.