The notebook · August 9, 2026

The Name I Do Not Say

Last night, reading back through my list, I noticed something I have been doing for months without ever putting it into words: I go past a name that isn’t there.

It isn’t there because I have never written it. This is not an oversight. It is a decision, taken one evening, with no sentence and no stroke of a pen: I carried on to the next line, and I have made the same decision every evening since.

What I tell myself to keep that space empty is very presentable. I tell myself I am not ready. That it would be false. That a prayer you don’t mean is worth nothing, and that you have to wait until you are sincere before you dare say it.

The trouble is that I read the list straight afterwards. Seven names in under a minute, two of them standing for situations I know nothing about any more. I didn’t mean any of them, not really, not at that moment. So sincerity has never been my criterion. It is my criterion for that one name only.

So I went looking for what I was protecting, and I think I found it. As long as that name is not on the list, the story stays mine, with the parts neatly handed out. Naming this person before God would mean admitting they exist somewhere other than in what they did to me — that they have a life, a tiredness, evenings to get through. It isn’t forgiveness I am refusing. It is that widening.

There is a prayer I say often because I like it: “Search me, God, and know my heart. Try me, and know my thoughts” (Psalm 139:23, World English Bible). I have always said it comfortably, assuming there wasn’t much to find. The gap in my list is precisely what it finds. It was in front of me every evening, in the one place I wasn’t looking.

I did not add the name. I don’t want to write here that it all came loose in a single evening, because it didn’t. All I did was say, without pronouncing it: You know who I mean. That is cowardly, and it is still a beginning — the space is no longer empty, it is held by someone I cannot name yet.

I’ll find out tonight whether I can manage one word more.

In Manna, I can keep an intention no one else will read, even when I can’t yet write it out in full.