Extrait

"In that uncertain period when Paul and I had been separated for several months but were not sure we wanted to get divorced, we sat down together to scan a set of no-fault, do-it-yourself divorce documents we'd ordered over the phone, as if houlding them in our hands would help us decide what to do. As we paged through the documents, we came across the question that asked the name we'd each have after the divorce. The line beneath the question was perfectly blank. On it, to my amazement, we could write anything. Be anyone. We laughed about it at the time, making up uncongruous new names for ourselves - names of movie stars and cartoon characters and strange combinations of words that weren't rightly names at all.

But later, alone in my apartment, that blank line stuck in my heart. That was no question that if I divorced Paul, I'd choose a new name for myself. [...] So in the months that Paul and I hung in marital limbo, unsure in which direction we'd move in, I'd pondered the question of my last name, mentally scanning words that sounding good with Cheryl and making lists of characters from novels I admired. Nothing fit until one day when the word strayed came into my mind. Immediatly, I looked it up in a dictionary and knew it was mine. Its layered definitions spoked directly to my life and also struck a poetic chord: to wander from the proper path, to deviate from the direct course, to be lost, to become wild, to be without a mother or father, to be without a home, to move about aimlessly in search of something, to diverge or digress.

I had diverged, digressed, wandered, and become wild. I didn't embrace the word as my new name because it defined negative aspects of my circumstances or life, but because even in my darkest days - those very days in which I was naming myself - I saw the power of the darkness. Saw that, in fact, I had strayed and that I was a stray and that from the wild places my straying had brought me, I knew things I couldn't have known before."