The DMV chair was bolted to the floor at an angle that made it impossible to sit up straight, and I remember thinking that was probably intentional, a small design decision meant to keep the line moving.
I was there to renew a license that still had my twenty-nine-year-old face on it, mouth caught mid-sentence, looking like someone who’d been asked to stop talking for a photo she didn’t want taken.
The clerk had the kind of practiced boredom that comes from asking the same six questions two hundred times a day. Address the same. Organ donor, still yes. Then, without looking up: any name changes since your last renewal.
I’d rehearsed this one, oddly. Not the answer — the moment of being asked it by a stranger who had no idea what the question was actually touching.
I took his name nine years ago at a courthouse counter that looked almost exactly like this one, if I’m honest, filled out by a version of me who thought the paperwork was the easy part and the marriage would be the hard part figured out later. It went the other way. The paperwork is still here. The marriage isn’t.
For a while after the divorce was final, I assumed changing it back was just a matter of finding the time — one more line item on a list of administrative grief nobody warns you about, somewhere between updating the insurance and figuring out what to do with a blender only one of you ever used.
Then I sat with it longer than the form technically allowed, and the clerk waited, not unkindly, the way people wait when they’ve seen every version of this pause before.
Here’s what I noticed, sitting in that bolted-down chair. The name doesn’t feel like his anymore. It hasn’t for a long time.
It’s the name on my business license, the one three newsletter subscribers know me by, the one a barista in this neighborhood reads off a cup order and gets right about half the time. It’s attached to a body of work I built after he was gone, not during him — every post on this site, every honest thing I’ve written here, has his old last name at the bottom of it, and none of it is about him.
Somewhere in the last few years, without a form or a ceremony or anyone’s permission, the name stopped being a souvenir of the marriage and became just mine — the same way a house you didn’t build can still be the one you know how to fix.
No, I told the clerk. No changes.
She didn’t ask why, because it isn’t her job to, and I didn’t offer one, because for the first time it didn’t feel like it needed an explanation attached to it — not to her, not to my sister, who’d gently asked the same question at Sunday dinner months ago, not to the version of me who spent a year assuming the name was something to eventually undo.
I got the new photo taken. Worse than the old one, somehow, which felt about right for a Tuesday.
I paid the fee, thirty-some dollars I didn’t think twice about, and walked back out to a parking lot where nothing about the moment looked like anything had happened. No one else in that building had the faintest idea that I’d just quietly decided something about who I am, using a laminated card as the paperwork for it.
That’s usually how the real decisions happen, in my experience. Not at the altar or the lawyer’s office, where everyone’s watching and the stakes are named out loud. In a beige waiting room, under fluorescent light, when a bored stranger asks you a yes-or-no question and you find out which answer is actually true now.
If there’s a name, a title, a habit, a piece of a former life you’ve been quietly assuming you’re supposed to shed because of how you came to have it — I’d ask whether it’s actually still tied to where it came from, or whether you’ve just kept calling it a leftover out of habit, long after it became something you built yourself.
Sometimes keeping a thing is its own kind of choosing.
I write the smaller, unfinished version of things like this in my newsletter first, usually before I know what they’re actually about.
With Love, Wren
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