At a glance, a person's name is nothing more than just the word used to refer to said person.

The meanings and etymologies of names have long been forgotten by common knowledge, and even in the rare moments when we're interested in them and know them, they're nothing more than a factoid to us.

But the name is often the most personal identification of a person. The use of a first name can be a sign of closeness, uttered in tension, love, intimacy, danger. How sacred!

They used to call me by my last name since there were always several people with my first name. So, from an early age, I began to identify more with my family name than with my own name. To avoid confusion, even in the words of my close friends in class, my name was eliminated as a referential opportunity, and so, they simply addressed me directly. That's something I had to understand intuitively.

That changed how I viewed myself for a long time.

My first name was preserved as if for people outside of school and at home, but this isolation created a kind of... trauma of hearing the name.

In high school, I was part of a group of friends in which this Erich boy also hung out. He used his first name extremely rarely, and even when he met different people, as he did with me, he introduced himself as Heine, his family name, which he always used as a replacement for his personal name, both in real life and on social networks.

When I met him, he, as usual, introduced himself as Heine. I replied, “It’s nice to meet you, Erich!”

He didn’t know I knew his first name.