I keep finding her white tennis shoes in different places. Maybe the nurses move them? I haven’t moved them. Or else they move around the ward on their own, impatient to get out of here as soon as possible. Yesterday, with her bag and white tennis shoes, I came through the transparent hospital door that opens in a circle, asked directions to the emergency room, where she’d been taken, intending to wait for the medication that would cure the pain in her arm, and then help her to tie the laces on her white tennis shoes, hold her hand as we crossed the parking lot to our car, and we’d drive home slowly, return to our everyday concerns, finish the tasks we’d begun in the kitchen: turn on the coffee machine, into which I had already poured water, spooned the coffee . . . But that wouldn’t happen, the doctors would meet us with bad news, she’d be settled into the oncology ward, and I’d stay beside her all night, like a loyal dog.

It all happened too fast. The doctors stated that, in all probability, she had cancer. I held her hand while she slept, she clasped mine tightly, because she was dreaming about something. And I thought, She isn’t dying, because dying people no longer dream! A ridiculous thought, but I held on to her till the morning, because there was no one there who could console me. The warmth of her hand and her whole sleeping body was the only acceptable reality for me.

All my life I have borne the burden of my meaningless name. But I came to terms with that early on, convinced it was after all just a name, that it didn’t matter what a boat was called, just that it could sail, and that we fill the being bearing our name with the glow of our being. It was a consoling thought. It’s only today, in my fifty-sixth year, that I have completely accepted and identified with my name. This is why. The doctor asks her: “What year is this? Which month? Where are we now?” She looks at him and there’s no reply, she has forgotten the year and the month and the place. Then the doctor points at me, sitting beside her bed, “And who is this man?” For a moment she settled her gaze, she appeared to be looking right through me, and I felt a chill run through my whole body. And I thought: She’s forgotten me. But then her face experienced a total transformation, she looked at me as though she had saved me from nonexistence, or as though she had just given birth to me, and with an expression of the purest love she said: “Semezdin, my Semezdin.” And that was the moment when my name filled with meaning. I was her Semezdin. That is my love story, and my whole life.