On a warm spring day, a baby girl entered the world. Like all newborns, she remained nameless for a time. But the moment eventually came when she was bestowed with a specific combination of letters—a word that became hers alone. It could have brought her peace and success, but instead, a curse crept silently behind that name.
A poisonous shadow hung over the lineage of women who shared this girl's name. Death and misfortune stalked anyone gifted with that particular arrangement of letters.
Women of that name died in childbirth, spiraled into alcoholism, or had their children stolen from them; they were often sickly and frail. Husbands were notoriously cruel to them, frequently leaving the family not just by choice, but by the hand of death. The girl's mother knew this. she had been furious when the father chose such a dreaded name for their little girl. She didn't want to brand her child with a name that carried the scent of a coffin, but the father had already announced the choice to everyone. Backing out would have been socially awkward—people would talk, after all. And so, she resigned herself to the paperwork.
The girl herself had no idea her name was dangerous. How could she know the dark history of her bloodline? Yet, she swallowed her mother's fear and resentment along with her mother's milk.
The curse nipped at her heels, making itself known in small ways at first. The girl was scolded for everything, beaten, and shunted into corners. A demon of the curse seemed to possess her mother, fulfilling the prophecy of misery. No one knew the wicked sorcerers who had started this cycle of grief. Who had cursed that name so many years ago? Why did it bring so much pain? There were no answers. There was only the name. Gradually, it began to feel ugly, common, and foreign to her. She didn't know whether to love it or hate it. Her mother told her that if she ever took a new set of letters, her life would change; she could start a new path.
***
As a young woman, the daughter tried to hide under various nicknames, attempting to take cover from the ill fortune of the name Sarah. But it didn't solve the problem. Misfortune rained down on her alongside constant illness. At school, trouble always found her; at home, there were only screaming matches. The prophecy of the cursed name came true every single day. Her self-hatred grew alongside a desperate urge to leave this planet behind.
At seventeen, Sarah decided to die. The pressure at home was endless. Things weren't going well at the university, either. Love was nothing but a disaster. The person she considered her best friend turned out to be a traitor and a bigot, judging Sarah for being friends with anyone outside their own social circle. Sarah, meanwhile, was in love with an international student from the Middle East. They had met while "negotiating" a passing grade for a Bioethics credit (as if any of you have ever been perfectly honest in school). He never loved her back, and her friend never stopped pestering her with vitriol. To force Sarah to stop seeing "outsiders," the friend told Sarah's mother a series of vivid, blatant lies—claiming Sarah was throwing herself at every foreign man she could find.
The demon inside the mother was unleashed by the news. The screaming and accusations began. Her mother waved her hands in the girl's face while Sarah shrank into her chair in terror. She was so tired of all the bullshit.
Simple hugs with friends had been twisted into something filthy, and her mother believed the lies. Of course, back then, the girl didn't think the problem was her cursed name. But I assure you, the name was to blame—and nothing else.
***
That same night, Sarah deleted every photo of herself from her computer, tore her pictures off the walls, and shoved them under the bed. Her movements were clinical and certain. She opened the kitchen cabinet and began unwrapping blister packs of pills. Her younger sister caught her in the act. Sarah threatened her, brandishing a scalpel she used for class, swearing she'd open her own throat if the girl said a word to their mother. The sister went to bed. It was the right choice; a bloody spectacle was avoided.
Sarah forced handfuls of pills into her mouth, washing them down with water. Her gag reflex kicked in almost immediately, a forceful wave pushing everything back up. The girl shoved the vomited mass back into her mouth, forcing herself to swallow. She kept at it until the white sludge finally stayed down. She washed her face and lay in bed. She felt no regret and no fear. Her head grew cloudy. Her tongue went numb. Darkness.
***
In the morning, Sarah opened her eyes. Her head was heavy, her mouth bone-dry, and her stomach turned with nausea. Most of all, she felt disappointment. There wasn't a spark of joy in waking up. The plan to die had failed, and now she had to live this damn life all over again. She drank some yogurt and decided to seek medical help since she was still breathing. Her mother, seeing her daughter looked unwell, launched into another round of insults. (Sarah had recently gotten braces, and her mother insisted they were the root of all her health problems. She claimed they never should have gotten them. Naturally, the braces were the disaster—that and the name.) Sarah's regret over her failed self-destruction intensified a hundredfold. Eventually, the mother found out what had happened that night. Sarah received a sliver of pity, followed by the news that she was "disgracing the family" with her actions. Those words did wonders for the girl's depression.
Our heroine's life story is a tragedy of walking on a razor's edge. She would try to leave the world a few more times, but someone would always stop her. She would encounter toxic men. She would endure emotional and physical abuse, hate herself, and even lose a child. She would tear herself apart and reject help from those who truly cared. She would lose faith in goodness. She would wait for death at every corner and eventually grow to fear it. Wasn't this exactly what her mother had predicted when she feared the name "Sarah"? The curse was operating at full capacity, and there seemed to be no way out.
But one day, the girl encountered the word "psychology," and it began to pull her out of the wreckage. Step by step, Sarah crawled out of the sludge and refused to keep taking the hits.
Still, the weight of the name remained. During a bout of strep throat, she finally decided to rid herself of that ruinous combination of letters. Her parents didn't stand in her way. Her mother was entirely in favor of it.
Sarah was overjoyed to have her family's support and ran as fast as she could to shed the curse. She updated every document she owned. She became Yvette.
Most people took the change in stride, but there were those who had to offer their unsolicited opinions and harass the woman now known as Yvette. They called her crazy and told her she was disrespecting her parents by making such a choice.
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