Collections: The Nicknames of Sole Magazine

Elizabeth, nine letters, was the longest name in my first grade class. The only name with a Z. I loved my name, the way it started with my favorite letter, E, the fact that it was two names pushed together. Still, I sometimes felt I could use a substitute, something lighter to be thrown back and forth in conversations. Occasionally, I would consider Liz, feeling the L roll off my tongue and the Z seal the three letters shut. Eliza looked familiar, but stressed the “i” differently. Beth sounded soft, the conclusion of my existing name. 

On the first day of Spanish class in first grade, the teacher approaches me, looking down at her clipboard with her pencil grazing the paper. 

“Elizabeth?” She looks up. She stutters where Eliza and Beth become one. 

“Yes?” I respond, returning the question in her voice.  

“Don’t you have a nickname?” she asks. “Your name is too long, you need a nickname.”

“Oh…no. What nicknames can I do?” I ask. 

She lists off Liz, Lizzy, Beth, then a new one: Libby. 

“I like Libby,” I say. “I’ll do that.” Finally, a nickname.

She scribbles something down on her clipboard and starts to walk away. My first grade self is thrown off by the interaction, but I excitedly write a big “LI” at the top of my paper.

“Wait,” I call out. She turns back and I hesitate. “How do you spell it?”

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“That’s such a Sahay thing to do” was quick to follow any blunder I committed or admirable feat I accomplished in high school. Starting in middle school and stretching throughout the four years of high school, none of my friends ever reverted to using my first name, always opting instead to refer to me by my surname. 

Their choice of moniker started mundanely enough—it was just a case of there being another Navya in the class, so it was easier to call me Sahay. It soon became a special, affectionate name that only my school friends would associate with me. In the hyper-sensitivity common to most teenagers, I oscillated between loving the special status of being referred to with something like a pet name and hating the fact that Sahay developed often into a creature in which all my eccentricities were caricatured.

Back then, I disliked the way the mannish clan name Sahay, which is my family name, inhabited my entire identity, and I felt (very mistakenly) that it disregarded my femininity. I felt like a mythical creature, who though loved and admired, is always treated with an air of fascination because of her dissimilarity to others. In my most angst-ridden moments, I was a fish in an aquarium my friends loved visiting, but precisely because they had the glass separation between the water and themselves. It’s a strange thing to be given a name that’s specific to a particular group of friends—it’s the part of yourself they know or a lens through which they see you. I worried that the name embodied all my peculiarities until I couldn’t separate them from myself.

When college began, unaccompanied by my nickname, I would catch myself getting a jolt at the oddest of times when someone referred to me as Navya. It was a heady thrill, to be known by my true name. Yet I found myself missing the nickname I had acquired from those who grew up with me, those I had known as children.

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He was nothing more than a common crook. Under the veil of night, he would slink down the alleys like a phantom, scurrying through puddles of light formed by streetlights above. He was paws without a body, a hazy mixture of shadows and fur. If you squinted, you’d see two slivers of moonlight gleaming hungrily in the dark, and a thick bushy tail darting back into the catacombs of wire and mesh.

When the blizzard came, I built him a manor of tarp and plaster. Every evening, the wind tore at its base with icy claws and howling screams. Yet every morning, he emerged from his fortress of scrap, shaken but alive. On the first day of spring, I saw him lay out in the concrete garden, basking in the warmth of the prodigal sun. He’d made it through the winter.

At first, his name was just “Grumpy Cat.” Briefly, it was “Garfield.” But it was my father who ultimately christened him “Mufasa.” The last time I saw him, he was walking down the street in the afternoon lull. He looked back, his face a tapestry woven by scars and bites, and let out a sigh. Then he was gone, and I was left with only the memories of a cat I never owned. A cat whose name I never knew.

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I went to a rather small high school, with only about 40ish people in each graduating class. You’d think such a smallness would lend itself well to nicknames and in-jokes, but I honestly never really had a nickname. I would walk past people I know, and they would go, “Hey, Sean Toomey,” like I was being called up by a DMV clerk. My fiancé says I have a name that lends itself well to being said in full, and experience seems to back him up. I was locked to my birth certificate—all except this one girl who always called me “seen bean.” A living hell.

It’s weird that it’s called a “nickname.” It’s almost as if the first ever use of a more familiar name was a Nicholas being called Nick. Or as if the transformation of Nicholas to Nick is so natural, so obvious, so inevitable that it serves as a model for all name shortening.

My name is Nicholas by the way, not Nick, and this is my petition to change the word for a nickname.

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For me, it all began with Nicklebud. That was what my immediate family called me as a toddler. After my soccer coaches in elementary school heard my mom yelling it on the sidelines, the whole team began calling me “Nicklebud.”

And then thanks to my coach’s sense of humor, I became Nicklebudlight. Later, just Bud Light.

Now my family usually just calls me “Nickle”—sometimes spelled “Nickel”—but there are other variations, of course. To one of my brothers I am Nicholo or Nicholomo, and to his friends, I am Nicklepoop. To an ex-girlfriend I was Necklace and to my friends in Brazil where I studied abroad I was Nicolau. My roommate exclusively calls me Dishes because one time three years ago I took too long to wash my silverware, while other people on this campus only refer to me by my full name: “Oh hi, Nicholas Miller!”

I love each of my alternate names and I am all of them (follow me on IG @nicklebud!)—just not Nick. Nick is my father, not me. Nick is the loud and kind of obnoxious kid I was friends with in high school, not me. Nick is the loveable doofus from New Girl people always bring up when they learn my last name, not me.

I really don’t care that much and anyway, it’s my fault for not correcting people. But no matter how much or how recently I’ve introduced myself as my actual name, it does seem that people love to take “nickname” literally.

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“Wonton!”

“Wonton? Why ‘wonton’?”

“I don’t know, man, it sounds like you.”

“Yeah, you know what you sound like? An idiot.”

To my dismay, however, the nickname stuck. At lunch, in the halls, and after school, I only had to hear “Wonton!!” to recognize the signal of my friends rapidly homing in on my position, the way a small swarm of middle schoolers often do. At first, it annoyed me a little, but this eventually faded. Gradually, it became part of the vague background noise of middle school life, the kind of background noise you get used to and never really notice until it stops.

When I moved away at the start of high school, the background noise of middle school annoyances began steadily fading as I met new people and slowly lost touch with my old friends. It wasn’t until the pandemic brought life to a grinding halt, however, that I realized the background noise had halted as well. In the opening days of the lockdown, I sat by myself in my bedroom in deafening silence. 

Preparing myself to reach out to my old friends again, I was surprised to see a sudden burst of activity; our once-dying group chats had come back to life. It seemed that we’d all had the same idea at the same time. As we caught up with each other, exchanging stories of freshman year and collectively complaining about quarantine, I felt the return of the old sense of familiarity and belonging. Though we were physically apart, I felt a sense of reconnection. And even though I knew that it was probably just a COVID thing and we would go our separate ways once more as soon as normalcy returned, I was happy, for a moment, to become Wonton again.

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