Améli. Six letters. A French name of Germanic origin. It means hardworking and industrious.
Amélie, who lost her name.
First, the i disappeared, violently disrupting the harmony of the remaining sounds. She became Amél – the girl who was caught in a devastatingly passionate, yet entirely one-sided relationship with a celebrity.
"Parasocial relationships...", her psychologist droned on, but Amél wasn't listening. She was thinking about him. Today, the K-pop group he belonged to was performing at a major awards ceremony. Was he nervous? In interviews, he had confessed that before every performance he worried about disappointing his fans. That sensitivity made her shiver with pleasure – she had chosen the right man.
Or rather, she liked to tell herself, chance had brought them together.
Back then, she was still called Améli and worked as an intern reporter for a cultural newspaper. She had been assigned to write a profile of a rising Korean boy band. At first, she approached the task with near indifference. Then she saw his face, and it seized her with startling suddenness. His eyes, his nose, his lips – his entire body colonized her thoughts.Somewhere during those first months of their relationship, she lost the final letter of her name. It hurt a little, but she chose not to dwell on the pain.
And when her essence finally shook off the l, she became Amé – the quiet girl with the perpetually wandering gaze. Her colleagues thought she was odd, but they simply couldn't understand the devotion her relationship demanded.
Besides consuming every possible video, photograph, and fragment of information about him, she also visited her beloved in her daydreams. But for the magic to happen, Amé required very particular conditions. She would put on her headphones and carefully choose songs to match the scenario unfolding inside her mind. Movement was essential. She had to pace back and forth or dance in order to sink completely into the fantasy.
And, of course, there were the stars.
She would switch off the lights in the childhood bedroom where she still lived and, before meeting him, look up at the faintly glowing star stickers scattered across her ceiling. They were her night sky. Like a princess in a fairy tale, she whispered her deepest wish to those beautiful celestial bodies.
"Please, let me meet him. Let me see him, if only for a moment. I promise that'll be enough. I won't ask for anything more."
Then she would press play, letting music move her body. The stars on the ceiling seemed to dance with her. When it was over, she would collapse onto her bed, drenched in sweat and overflowing with emotion.
Unfortunately, this sacred ritual could only be performed safely in her parents' house, where Amé still lived. The rest of the time, she merely struggled against the crude, unfinished outlines of reality. She existed solely in anticipation of those moments with him.
She lost the e in a particularly cruel way. She was sitting naked in front of the bathroom mirror, still fogged from the hot shower. Her hair was wet as she examined every part of her body. What use was it, after all, if the love she carried existed in another, immaterial world?
Besides, her body was hopelessly imperfect. The fat she had tried to diet away ever since her teenage years. A face marked by the wrong racial features—without almond-shaped dark eyes or flawless honey-colored skin. The unremarkable brown of her hair.
In that moment she felt such overwhelming hatred toward her own existence that she simultaneously realized she could truly belong to him only if her physical form were erased.
She became Am.
"Am, am", like the sound mothers make as they offer a spoonful of purée to a child.
"Am, am", she swallowed the idea of bodilessness and spat out her flesh in disgust. She didn't need it – not in her imagined world.
Gradually, she even abandoned the desire to see the real object of her love. His group would soon be touring her city, and she could easily afford a ticket. But what was the point? Her prayer to the stars had lost its power. No, it was no longer enough simply to catch a glimpse of him. She wanted to possess him – to possess every edge of his soul. Yet she remained just tethered enough to reality to understand that such a thing was impossible.
The realization that she was merely one fan among thousands, a single drop in an endless ocean, brought her unbearable pain. Her emotional capacity wasn't large enough to contain such a corrosive feeling. It was easier to surrender to the temptation of nihilism, which, in her case, took the peculiar shape of an all-consuming self-hatred.
Her dream was absurd, of course, because she herself was insignificant. Inadequate.She repeated it to herself every day.
The final stage of her transformation reduced her identity to a single letter:
A.
Though it was pronounced not as a letter, but as Aaaa – the cry a child lets out after falling, once the stinging pain in scraped knees finally arrives.
But Aaaa had wounded something far deeper than her body. Her indifference toward the world kept her from seeking help.
One night she lay on the floor because the parquet felt pleasantly cool, its hardness offering some small sense of support. She stared at the glow-in-the-dark stars.
She no longer listened to music.
The stars had stopped dancing.
She wasn't even thinking about him.
She closed her eyes and imagined her flesh being slowly, agonizingly dissolved by acid.At that very moment, she felt a surge of intense arousal.
Perhaps Aaaa was nothing more than the breathless moan of her own bodilessness.
