I am that I am.

In the bleak and quiet horror of a concentration camp morning,

Viktor Frankl asked them why. Why not throw themselves against

The comforting hum of electric fences or onto swords like Brutus.

Why not succumb to nothingness, how did they hold onto their very selves?

And the answer

Of course

Was in the question.

Because they were themselves. They were distinct and unique

There existed no other living breathing Anne

Who could exist and live and breathe the way Anne could.

What power is in a name, I wonder.

What power carved out by these names that delineate us,

That draw the line between me and you.

The weight and scratchy stiffness of generations

Carried down and pressed into a few letters on paper.

My grandmother’s mother’s name sits between my first and last.

I never knew the lines of her face or stinging slap of her hand or the smell of her hair,

And yet it is by her name that I know myself.

It seals my words as it flows from my pen tip

It is the private password to my being.

And I know, as Frankl knew, that if I found myself in their place,

Denied all the basic building blocks of human life,

The will to live would remain locked away inside of me,

The key being something the only thing I truly need,

The only thing they could never take away,

My name.