At a crossroads a woman met a stranger. She had walked three days. He was walking the other direction and looked like someone who had been walking longer.
She said: I am tired of my name.
He said: I have been looking for something to carry.
They sat at the crossroads for one night. She told him everything she knew about her name: where it had come from, what it had cost her, who had said it in ways that stuck and who had said it in ways that meant nothing at all. She told him the name's history as precisely as she could, which was imprecisely, because a name's history is also the history of everyone who ever said it, and she did not have access to all of that. She could only give him what she knew. In the morning she gave him the name, along with the portable portion of the history. He gave her his, which was simpler and lighter and smelled, she thought, of a different kind of soil.
He walked on. She walked on in the other direction.
What she had not told him: a name does not transfer what you are underneath it. It transfers what others expect of you when they hear it. This can be useful, or it can be its own weight, differently shaped.
What he had not told her: he had given away three names before this one. He was good at beginning.
They did not meet again. Whether this was a loss depended on what you thought the meeting had been.