When the mailman slipped that envelope under my door for the third time, I finally lost my patience. The addressee was listed as \u201cS. Miller,\u201d but my last name is Smith. I went down the entire street with the envelope in hand, but no one there was named Miller.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cSend it back to the sender,\u201d I told the mailman.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cIt\u2019s already been returned three times,\u201d he shrugged. \u201cIt always comes back exactly as it was.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The envelope was plain brown paper and felt empty to the touch. But I was in a hurry to leave that day, so I casually wrote \u201cS. Miller\u201d in the signature field and tossed the envelope into a drawer.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The next morning, the billing address on my credit card statement had changed. It wasn\u2019t a spelling mistake\u2014my name, \u201cThomas Smith,\u201d had been changed to \u201cThomas Miller.\u201d The bank insisted that their records had never been altered and that I must have misremembered.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I called the credit bureau, and the customer service representative was silent for a few seconds: \u201cMr. Smith, my records show that your name has been Miller for seven years.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The envelope in my drawer was gone. In its place was a yellowed birth certificate bearing the name \u201cS. Miller\u201d\u2014the date of birth matched mine exactly, and my parents\u2019 names were the same, except for the last name. The edges of the paper showed signs of water damage, as if it had been stored in a damp basement for many years.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I started signing my work documents as \u201cS. Miller,\u201d because whenever I signed \u201cSmith,\u201d the pen tip would make a sound like a fingernail scraping a blackboard, and the ink would turn a dark red. When my colleagues asked why I\u2019d changed my signature, I told them that Miller was my mother\u2019s maiden name.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Last week, while cleaning out the attic, I found an old photo album. In one photo, my parents and I were at the beach; I was five years old, holding an ice cream cone. On the sand behind my father, someone had written \u201cThe Miller Family\u201d with a twig. I flipped to the last page of the album, and on the back of the photo was a line of shaky pencil writing: \u201cThe real Smith family moved away in 1978 and never came back.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
That afternoon, I walked past the old house where I used to live; the new residents were mowing the lawn. He looked up\u2014his face was exactly like mine. \u201cHey, Miller,\u201d he greeted me casually, \u201cyou\u2019re finally back.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I looked down at my mailman\u2019s uniform and saw that my name tag read \u201cS. Miller.\u201d And that was the name on all my documents\u2014my driver\u2019s license, passport, marriage certificate. In my mailbox was an unstamped letter addressed to \u201cThe Real Thomas Smith,\u201d with forty return-to-sender stamps.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I turned around, and through the window of the old house, someone was waving at me from behind the glass.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
That day, I signed for someone else<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":459,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[14],"tags":[18,22],"class_list":["post-458","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-suspense","tag-story","tag-suspense"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/storyrecyclebin.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/458","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/storyrecyclebin.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/storyrecyclebin.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/storyrecyclebin.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/storyrecyclebin.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=458"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/storyrecyclebin.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/458\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":460,"href":"https:\/\/storyrecyclebin.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/458\/revisions\/460"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/storyrecyclebin.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/459"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/storyrecyclebin.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=458"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/storyrecyclebin.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=458"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/storyrecyclebin.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=458"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}