I tell most people different things

I tell most people my name is something else.

Not because I am pretending, although I suppose some people would call it that. Not because I am ashamed either, though that accusation would be easier to dispute than the quiet, interior fact of wanting to be misheard. The truth is more banal, which is to say more revealing: in places with too much noise, in bars where the ceilings are low and the music is always louder than the people, I choose something brief. I say Ale, not out of affection but out of survival.

There is a kind of fatigue that sets in when you are constantly asked to repeat yourself. A kind of dulling. You begin to streamline your existence for the comfort of strangers. You start to abbreviate yourself.

If I am standing, upright, visible, estimable in the way people are when they are surrounded by other people, I am five feet nine inches. I do not want to be the short man with the long name. There is something about that configuration that feels theatrical. Unnecessary.

Ale is easier. Ale is functional. Ale tells me whether you know me from now or from before.

Work is its own performance. In work I am Alex, because Alex is frictionless. It fits neatly into documents, contracts, into sentences spoken in Zoom meetings. Alex does not interrupt the momentum of someone else’s agenda.

There are a few who still call me Ale, and they do it the way people do things when they are not performing. Their mouths don’t pause over the vowels. They just say it. It arrives like memory does: informal, unannounced, slightly faded.

Then there are the people who say Alessandro, not with the drag of American vowels, not clumsy or ironic or curious, but with an accent that belongs elsewhere. Spanish, maybe. Something rounder, more confident. It’s never quite Italian, though I don’t correct them.

I don’t know where to place these people. They occupy a strange space, somewhere between familiarity and defiance. I love that they do it. Not because it is flattering, but because I gave them an exit. I gave them Ale, I made it easy. And still they chose not to take it.

That choice matters to me, although I wouldn’t say it out loud.

It’s not a test. Or if it is, I didn’t mean for it to be. But it becomes one, slowly, the way all observations do. It becomes a kind of informal study.

When I ask people what they think of my name, they usually say they love it. There is something sentimental in the way they say it, as if they want me to be proud of it on their behalf.

What I think is that it’s a strange thing to carry a name that is ordinary in one place and almost ornamental in another. In Italy, Alessandro is everyone. It means nothing. It is wallpaper. Here, in Los Angeles, I have met three others. Three, and each time I wanted to stare at them a little too long, as if we shared something more than a name, as if we belonged to a misplaced category.

I like my name. I like it more than I admit. Not because it is rare, but because it seems to mean something to other people. Something I have no real access to.

And I’ve learned that what matters most, in the end, is not what your name is, but what people are willing to do with it.