As per my Writer's Guild prompt: What if you had no name? How would you relate to people?
My parents were cruel. Well I take that back, my parents were incompetent, and they did lots of drugs, but they weren’t exactly mean. You see, I was never named. That’s right, my birth certificate is as blank as my parent’s short term memories. I have a birthday, and blood type, but no name.
Kindergarten was were I first realized that I was a bit different from the other kids. My teacher would never really call on me, you see, because she was too weirded out by the whole thing. And when Marky and Johnny and Joey were out playing in the sandbox they never really invited me to tag along either.
Middle school brought about the realization that I could basically go wherever, whenever I wanted. In the middle of class I would often just stand up and walk out, because it wasn’t as if the teacher could shout at me to come back, it would just come out as “Hey!................you………….come back here” and I would then proceed to look around me and walk out, because they were obviously not addressing me, I was nameless.
When I got to high school I thought I’d try being cool and utilize the absence of a name as a sign of uniqueness, but I soon realized that it wasn’t truly about being unique, it was about the clothes. So there too I felt like an outcast, until the day I found my new passion. It was the summer of sophomore year, and my rich uncle died in a fire that also happened to burn his will which contained only named recipients. So they divided up all his stuff amongst the family and I just so happened to find an acoustic guitar amongst a pile of old clothes. So I started to teach myself, starting with simple notes and moving up to progressively more challenging chords. By the time I had finished that semester I was playing along to The Beatles and The Eagles, by the time I had finished that year I was playing along to Hendrix and Zeppelin. At that point I adopted my very first and only identity, I was, the guitar man.