She peered across the city, what was at first a twinkle on the horizon now a bright star racing towards her on the breezes of the shore. As it came closer it began to take a clearer human shaped form. A girl with thick white curls that whipped around her head in the wind, flying on some sort of hovering bike. The girl seemed to catch a glimpse of her figure, high above the street as she was, and with a shout and a wave of greeting steered in her direction, ducking out of sight for a moment as she traversed the streets below. Clearly the bike couldn’t quite handle anything too high off the ground.
She was overwhelmed. A human. Here. After so long. It felt like her body was going into shock, everything seemed to slow down around her, yet be happening so fast she couldn’t keep up. And the human kept getting closer, skirting around broken cars and trees. She wasn’t ready. She had thought about humans plenty, wondered where they had all gone, what it would be like for the city to be full again. But she hadn’t really planned what she would do if one showed up.
"Hey!" The girl shouted up from where the bones met the earth, her voice getting mostly lost to the winds. She seemed to realize this and propped her bike up on the base of the bone, before scaling the hard surface using the notched footholds.
Her mind catching up, she went to return the greeting, before realizing the moment had passed. The girl shimmied across the bone, not confident using her prosthetic leg across the bone’s smooth surface, lifting her strapped sunglasses to reveal brilliant violet eyes fanned in a thick layer of milk white lashes. "Hey!" She repeated "I’m Ceit! It's so great to meet you, I haven’t seen anyone for weeks! It was already so great to be in a city again, I’ve been traveling in the woods for just ages and was really looking forward to sleeping on a mattress and saw this city, and just thought wow, Oongx is really looking out for me, but then I saw there was no one around and I was a little sad because I haven’t really had anyone to talk to for a while besides Oongx and she doesn't really talk back most of the time…Anyway, sorry, just I haven’t seen anyone for a really long time. What’s your name?" Ceit stopped abruptly, looking expectant. She seemed to say all of this without a breath between, even more impressive given what a strenuous climb she had just taken. She waved her hands airly as she talked, gesturing to indicate the expanse around them when referencing the city, and above when she talked about Oongx.
‘I…I don’t have a name.’ She fidgeted anxiously, both at the proximity and at the line of conversation. It wasn’t that the girl, Ceit, was sitting too close, just that her existence was too close, that having another human be so close to her was completely beyond her expectations and she still couldn’t catch up that something so inconceivable had just happened. It was like she had just manifested, out of thin air. There had been no Ceit, and then, bam. Ceit. She existed, she was loud and bright and here.
‘What!? You don’t have a name!? You’ve never had someone to call you? But you know how to speak, so there must have been someone right?’ Her hands waved even harder at the pronouncement. Beads jangling in her hair, a lone white curl escaping the band holding her hair back from her face before she brushed it futility behind her ear, the wind refusing to cooperate and immediately releasing it again.
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‘No no! I just mean, I did have one, I just can’t remember anymore.’ She was adjusting to the presence of the other girl, and now that she wasn’t disappearing, wasn’t a wishful manifestation of her fantasies, her excitement was kicking in. Here was another human, and a girl! Like her! Well, mostly. She was still a ghost, but she was fairly sure she was getting more opaque as time went on. And if a human could appear, maybe her form would someday condense and she would become a whole girl. Anything seemed possible.
‘Oh! I’m so sorry, and I mean, that’s totally ok that you don’t have a name, I mean, I’m sorry you can’t remember, that really sucks, just, just, I didn’t mean to be so surprised when you said that, it’s not like I haven’t met anyone without a name before you know? But um, how would you like me to call you? You know, if I have to ask you something, I don’t really want to yell ‘Hey you!’ Unless, you know, that’s what you want me to say?’ Ceit shifted a little, seemingly unbothered by the harsh sound from her leg shifting against the bone. But then, little seemed to bother her, she hadn’t even acknowledged she was talking to a ghost. But maybe someone who had met other people with no name had met others with no form too. Or maybe even others without either.
‘I, I’m not sure. Well, I’d like to have a name, it just feels a bit wrong, to pick a new one. Feels a bit like I’m giving up on trying to find my real one.’ She hadn’t realized it, but now that she was putting it into words she could hear how true it was. She had been afraid of change, just as much if not more strongly than she had craved it. Afraid of what change might bring, if it would be more painful than the loneliness of her current life, of disturbing the balance her life currently occupied. She had been happy with the way her life was, lonely, but happy.
‘That makes sense, but having one name doesn’t mean you can’t have another too. Lots of people have more than one name! I have five! Technically. But no one uses them except my grandmother, and great aunts, and the older Oongx acolytes anyway,’ she ticked away the people on her fingers. Apparently it was a longer list than she had expected. ‘And it’ll be super special if you get to give one to yourself, like it can be an expression of your love for yourself! Maybe you think of something you like? If I were picking a name, hmmm, I might choose one of the stars in Oongx’s constellations, or maybe like, Iris or Lavender, for flowers I like. My name, Ceit, means eight, for the number child I am in this generation,’ she made a face, ‘it’s not the most imaginative of names, I think my parents ran out of ideas after my sister.’ She giggled conspiratorially.
‘Something I like…hm…’ She hadn’t spent as much time thinking about her likes as she had on her main dislike - loneliness. But given her recent revelation on change, perhaps she had a more complicated relationship with loneliness as well. She had spent her entire existence, for as long as she could remember, being alone. Alone with the ruins and the trees and the small skittering beings that made them their home.
Alone. Even if it wasn’t something she liked, it was something familiar to her, and it had shaped her, defined her entire existential experience. There was nothing defining her reality besides her isolation in it. The only soul left in a broken city, out of place amongst the dead memories and in the wrong time. Alone. Alene. That sounded alright.
‘I think I could like being Alene.’
‘That’s beautiful!’ Ceit laughed, unaware of the epiphany Alene had just experienced, her hands clapping together. ‘And it’s so exciting to be the first one to hear your new name! Now we’re friends.’ She said the last bit happily, with mock solemnity.
Alene laughed in delight, feeling her heart lighten with the new joy of laughing along with someone else.