I glare determinedly at the rock in my pudgy dirt-streaked palm, moving my sharpie carefully across its craggy face. One mildly straight vertical line on the right, and another on the left. Underneath them, I draw a wobbly semi-circle, and a lopsided friend smiles up at me. My first pet.
But what to name it?
I ponder as hard as my 4-year-old mind will let me, but at the end of the day, still no name. I go to my mother, who tells me off for bringing an object of nature indoors. She doesn’t give me a name. I go to my father, who tells me to name it Jimi Hendrix, whoever that is. I go to my older brother, who steals it from me in a short squabble and throws it far, far away, over the backyard fence and into the woods, never to be seen again. Still, no name. Perhaps my rock is still lying there, his inky lips drawn up in a smile even as he is buried under layer after layer of decaying leaves.
Six years later, my family and I troop to an animal shelter to pick up our first dog. We walk in and the hallway is dim and narrow. I am surrounded on all sides by towers of cages stacked three high, all filled with barking, whimpering dogs. All nameless, all shouting “Take me! Take me!” like they have yesterday, and the day before that, and the day before that. We pick ours, a German shepherd mix. But what to name it?
My brother and my 6-year-old sister clamor over each other, spewing out names. “Sparkles,” my sister says,
“Frankenstein,” my brother shoots back.
“Crystal.”
“Hulk.”
“Rainbow.”
“Batman.”
“Butterfly.”
As they argue, I look around at all the hopeful faces and wagging tails, watching them fall in droves over the fence into nothingness, watching them disappear under the mountains of leaves until the black of their quivering noses is barely visible, and then not at all.
Five years later, my name is scrawled across countless applications and countless essays. Then a paper in a stranger’s hands. I am reviewed for two minutes and then passed on.
“We are sorry to say…”
And then I am a dot, a statistic on Naviance. As I flounder among the numbers, my hand finds a clump of golden fur, and I find myself surrounded by wagging tails. All the nameless dogs pounce on me and I stumble backwards. In the mess, I find myself clutching something rough and uneven. A dirty rock grins blindly at me, its smile faded through the years into the grey of its porous skin.
I sit at my desk, nameless.
10 years later, I sit at a bar, drinking disgruntledly as I watch my sister celebrate her 21st birthday the only way she knows how. The pounding music makes my ears ring, and the bartender can barely hear me as I shout for another beer. A man sits down next to me, looking just as uncomfortable as I was.
“What’s your name?” I ask him, and he responds, but his voice is swept away in the vibrating bass of the music. We chat through the night in half-understood conversation, laughing, dancing. 
Six years later,
This is it.
She lies in my sweaty arms, screaming and waving her pudgy fists through the air. The white room, the doctor, the nurses, they all fade in the background, and it is just me and her.
In the quiet, she stops her angry screeching and waves her arms experimentally.
“Hi,” I whisper to her.
She gurgles, I giggle.
Exhaustion drags down my eyelids, but I can’t rest, not now, not ever again, not with her here, squinting up at me with her happy toothless smirk, as if she already knows how much I love her.
Next to me, a dog whimpers and a worn rock rolls as if by magic next to its paw.
Goodbye, they say, farewell.