It so happens that yours like mine isn't a name out of the ordinary run of johns and marys, nor it even a vaguely memorable one. It is the kind of name that would suffer mispronounciation, would survive a million possibilities of spelling, would be wrongly heard and confused for another and yet slip out unnoticed by memory.

And yet I would meet your namesakes everywhere, wondering why I call them by a name that seems to belng to you so entirely that the rest of them might be impostors.

But our faces, theirs is a fate not entirely different, only more favourably dealt with by posterity. It takes a stranger on the seat next to ours in the bus, a backward glance along a beachside walkway,an awkward introduction for that barely suppressed murmur of "But I've seen your face somewhere" to remind us of this.

Suddenly, nieces in the flush of summer vacations, tic-tac-toe defeats avenged by bespectacled bench mates and old neighbours come back to life.

And when I close my eyes, they never shut their doors on your face and I have to blink you out of them in two minutes. So I lie awake with the lights on, watching the blankets folding into endless tunnels to my knees.