One day in front of my computer I suddenly notice that I have been spelling it wrong. I mix up the final two letters of my last name, transposing them. I realize that I have done this before, almost every time I type. This does not happen with my signature. There the letters flatline and lose their distinction from one another and you cannot read them, except for the middle K poking up like a spike on a heart monitor. But when I type my fingers move faster than my brain and trip over the keys in a rush to just get it out. Or, my fingers are slow. They confuse easily. They do not realize that we have moved on from the first name and now the N follows the A instead of the other way around. So I become Nina Mamikunina, book ending myself. Ending in an INA instead of the telltale IAN, my new name sounds more Spanish than Armenian but, at first glance, I have always been mistaken for Latina anyway. I start to wonder if people in insurance offices and at reservation desks will have an easier time pronouncing it now that the letters at the end match my first name but I will probably still have to wait patiently while people, squinting, tell me that the names don’t match up as they stumble through their files and lose me from their databases. Some days I worry that my new name will give me as much trouble as the first one—it was painstaking to learn to spell in kindergarten. And some days I wish I were my brother, Maximillian, who will never have this problem.
