Imagine Ryan choosing their own name

Imagine was the name. Yes, believe it. Mother from a country in the Global South, father from a poor and conflict-ridden part of Europe. Their father’s name was Ryan Ryan (who, in their right mind, would name their son “Ryan” when the surname is already “Ryan”?). Their mother’s name was “Inni,” which means lonely water. Inni remained that lonely water for a long time, always alone, always in motion. Until, later in life, they encountered this completely uncomfortable immigrant boy in the middle of a music festival. He stood in the middle of the crowd, dancing (if you could call it that) like a roadside inflatable doll, with both feet firmly planted on the ground. Inni said to herself, “I’m going to talk to this person before they explode.” Ryan Ryan couldn’t believe that someone with that kind of energy was coming towards him. And so began a casual, pointless conversation. Inni made Ryan Ryan feel less out of place. Ryan Ryan made Inni feel loved. One day, when Ryan was in a very altered state of consciousness, he said to Inni:

“We’re going to have a daughter. She’ll have your eyes. The most important thing is that she’ll be born here. We’re going to build a life so that they feel part of this place, like I’ve never felt part of anywhere. I think they deserve it. Our daughter will look just like their mother: tall, mysterious, and dark-haired. And they might even have a bit of their father’s temperament, perhaps a little calmer and more peaceful…”

Inni responded, surprised, with just one sentence:

Imagine, Ryan!

And so the name was chosen. Imagine Ryan. Just eight months after that conversation, they were born, the exact opposite of their father’s prophecy. Their European features were the perfect facade, but their evasive behavior left no doubt that Imagine didn’t belong. They grew up among other children, with the feeling that they were always floating on the edge of something they would never reach. Imagine felt they were part of something they didn’t recognize in the real world. When Imagine went to school, the children tried to approach them, play with them, and create bonds. But Imagine looked at them as if they didn’t understand their interest. Imagine just wanted to keep learning there; they didn’t want to smile at people they didn’t know. And with each new school, the feeling grew: their thirst for knowledge gradually suffocated any attempt to exercise their social skills. As for the name, “Imagine,” it didn’t help their integration and always seemed provisional—mispronounced, corrected, questioned. Each version of their name corresponded to someone else’s expectations, never to their own.

The passage of time hasn’t helped Imagine. Youth had also served as a good disguise for all their inadequacy. While you’re young, you have the right to be quirky, a “weirdo.” Today, Imagine feels that the mirror no longer reveals the few certainties of the past. Imagine Ryan feels extremely out of place in their own reflection and also in life—the pronouns change depending on who is looking, their skin looks different under different lights, their accent changes mid-sentence. Mirrors today seem accusatory. Socialization seems like an even bigger trap. Imagine knows they need to be more polished, more diplomatic, more charming, at least on the surface. After all, their survival depends on it.

Imagine specializes in “unclassifiable materials.” They catalogue alternative archives, memory institutions, and oral history projects to feed a type of artificial intelligence being developed on parameters different from those that already exist. Furthermore, Imagine maps things that officially don’t exist: informal routes, social boundaries, emotional geographies, affective atmospheres, places people avoid or where they remain without reason. They engage in dialogue with these people who give meaning to space without ever fully inhabiting it—transforming estrangement into vision. For this work, Imagine has all the necessary qualities: a natural talent that keeps their findings relevant and disruptive. To handle the institutional part of their mission (structured reports, meetings, conferences, political articulations, and arrangements), Imagine struggles with social alienation and a total lack of commitment, more a personal crisis than a choice. After 17 years, they remain an invisible figure in their field, despite all their fascinating discoveries. They continue to be admired for their achievements, but what truly stands out are their flaws.

Imagine ‘s parents continued to prophesy about their life until the day they passed away. Their mother always joked about Imagine’s future, always describing a phenomenal, famous, special Imagine, full of titles, recognition, and success. Their father, on the other hand, described Imagine as someone happy, nothing more. Someone who had found love, peace, and belonging. They always ended these prophetic sessions with the classic phrase: “IMAGINE, Imagine!” And Imagine imagined. Imagine spent most of their life imagining, building images in their head and heart. Imagine felt anger at their parents’ prophecies and fear of not being able to fulfill them. Now, without them, Imagine wondered if they had made the right decisions. Their parents trusted that Imagine would be a happy person. They were unable to honour that trust. The future arrived, and Imagine kept imagining it, even though they knew they no longer had all the time in the world.

Imagine always knew they had inherited their parents’ prophetic tendencies. An erratic prophecy, often the opposite, which, in practice, served no purpose. To make matters worse, in the autumn, Imagine began having recurring dreams in which they were late for something—but didn’t know what for. In the dream, the landscape constantly changes. No one recognizes them. They are alone in a place they have always known, but which does not look back at her. In this dream, someone speaks to Imagine. Something about an eternal state between past and future, a suspended state between them and the expectations placed upon them. They feel that their physical place does not correspond to the place their soul should occupy, but they don’t know where to put their soul. When winter arrived, Imagine no longer slept deeply; they only dreamed.

Imagine Ryan lived in a city built upon layers of erased histories: Indigenous lands, colonial architecture, renamed and rezoned immigrant neighborhoods. One snowy night, on their way home, a familiar intersection split into three diverging streets that had never existed before. Imagine stops and thinks about all the substances she’s experimented with over years of work, master plants that expand consciousness. Will their brain finally exact a price for this experimentation? Has the time come for Imagine to go insane? At the center of this fragmentation is a figure in mismatched shoes, a long winter coat, and very short shorts that reveal long legs dotted with light and dark spots. A large hat covers the expression of the undefined figure. Imagine doesn’t dare approach; they just close their eyes and pray the old prayer their mother taught them. They only want this scene to return to normal, even if normal is strange to them.

The figure looks at Imagine and says calmly:

— You’ve been standing at this crossroads for years and always thought it was a character flaw. Tonight, between midnight and dawn, I will dissolve all borders, and you will finally feel at home. With that, languages will mingle. People will remember silenced ancestors. Official histories will unravel. You will see the reality of the world. I will return here when the sun rises, and you will be able to choose a new name that, once spoken, will never change.

Just as the figure appeared, it vanished, and Imagine remained standing at the intersection of the three unreal roads. Imagine decided to take another path, hoping that this episode would disappear, along with their dreams. They entered the Avenue and began listening to the conversations around them. It is late and very cold, but the street is strangely busy. People talk to each other to understand the situation. Each person speaks in their own native language, and everyone understands each other in a supernatural way. Imagine sees children sitting in the street, listening to stories about distant countries, and that the elderly matter, since the lives of ancestors seem to form the basis for relationships between people. Imagine walks among the people and understands that, that night, they are seeing an unreal world, but that, deep down, it is the real world to which they belong. But Imagine knows that this world will last until the sun appears on the horizon. Imagine sees the figure from the crossroads among people, sometimes listening, sometimes a child, sometimes telling the stories of their ancestors. The figure seems liberated at that moment when everything and everyone only make sense if they are mixed together.

Imagine took the opportunity to tell their stories. Stories they didn’t even know they kept in their heart. Stories of a frozen land, where humanity and the more-than-humans lived in harmony. A place where the little ones of nature received gifts and bestowed blessings to enrich the lives of the merely-humans. A land that held the story of how interdependent worlds separated and became competitors: one legend and the other reality. But Imagine was also able to tell the story of a hot and humid land, full of flowing and still waters. In this land, each spirit presented itself as a natural force, sometimes calm and nourishing, other times violent and destructive. The merely-humans recognized this instability and adapted their lives to it, not the other way around. They knew that survival was determined by the developed capacity for adaptation, not by the ingenuity of taming the world. In the hot land, Imagine could see the natural-mystical world on the same plane as the merely human world. In the frozen land, Imagine observed the exchange relationships as an eternal dialogue between what is seen and what needs to be intuited. Other people told stories of different worlds, always complementing the previous story. By the end of the night, the stories intertwined, forming the fabric that unites what is seen and what can only be felt.

Imagine Ryan returned to the crossroads as the sun rose. The figure was there, this time with long hair, long red nails, and bright, shrewd eyes that stared directly at her, undisguised.

Hybrid: my background + image from ChatGPT.

Imagine looked back and recognized in the figure the faces of all the stories they had heard. Imagine stood before the totality of the world, without choices, without contradictions. Only everything that is possible to exist inhabiting the same one. Imagine then felt the urge to speak, for the first time, to the totality of the world:

— You are ambiguity, indefiniteness. Why do you want me to choose a name for myself?

— In truth, you have three options, like the three roads that meet here. One is hot, the other is cold, and the third is refusal. With one of the first two, you finally belong. With the third, you become the guardian of the night and the crossroads. To guard the night means to remain on the margins, invisible to daytime institutions. To choose to belong means to reinforce the very boundaries that have wounded you.

Imagine Ryan couldn’t speak. They could only feel, and feeling was much more than words. They could hear the heart of each person who rediscovered their forgotten history and understood what had always been in their heart. The figure then smiled and said in a diagnostic tone:

— You chose becoming instead of being...

The figure leaned in and whispered the name—not in Imagine’s ear, but in the space between the words of this story. When the sun rose, the night retreated, like a lung expelling air. Imagine remained exactly where they were—the same body, the same city, the same life. But something had changed. The mirror now showed more than Imagine; the mirror was reflecting the crossroads.

Imagine went back to work. They wrote reports. They attended meetings. Their findings were cited without attribution. Nothing changed. Except that, sometimes, anomalies would appear in the margins of official documents—footnotes that no one remembered writing, maps that suggested impossible paths, datasets that refused to be categorized. Imagine never correcting them. They knew now that disruption didn’t require visibility. Some systems rot precisely because no one can locate or define what combats them. Indefiniteness is the key; night is the new disguise; the task was even more laborious than before: remaining at the crossroads, rowing in the middle of the river. Indefining, reconfiguring, permanently destabilizing. Imagine felt even angrier at being demanded that way, and they understood they still couldn’t escape the legacy they had received. Imagine never slept again, only dreamed. They understood that the freedom of becoming was the eternal exercise of movement, of indefiniteness, of imagination. It was work and pleasure. And above all, it was their presence in the infinite.