I’ve lived in this city for sixteen years. Long enough for its name to stop feeling like a label and start feeling like a sound my life grew around.
Recently, the city was officially given a new name.
I don’t oppose it. I don’t resist it. I understand that names evolve, histories shift, language moves forward. This isn’t about disagreement.
It’s about something quieter.
I keep thinking about old photographs — the kind taken without intention. A friend laughing mid-step. A bus ride home. A younger version of myself waiting somewhere ordinary. In the background, almost invisible at the time, the city’s old name appears. On a bus stand sign. On a shop board. On a wall we never meant to archive.
Those images haven’t changed. But the world around them has.
And now it feels as if those names are being gently asked to disappear. Not erased exactly — just no longer spoken aloud. As if the past has been told, thank you, but we’re moving on.
What happens to memory then?
Because a name is not just identification — it’s orientation. It’s how we tell stories. It’s how we explain where we were becoming who we are.
Perhaps this is why, in a tradition where many women adopt a new name after marriage, I decided to remain rooted in mine.
Not out of defiance. Not as a statement. But because I’ve always felt that names hold history — personal geography. They carry the girl I was, the woman I became, the life that shaped me before it merged with another.
Just like a city, I grew. I evolved. I built new meanings. I didn’t feel the need to replace the name that held my earlier becoming in order to honour what came next.
The new name — will hold new memories, and that is beautiful. But the old name holds something irreplaceable: continuity. A record of having existed fully, honestly, without knowing one day it might feel historical.
Perhaps cities don’t lose their names. Perhaps women don’t either.
Maybe we simply learn to carry them more gently — like something fragile, like something loved.
