Temptation III: Choosing a name

I was writing about a fictional person named Denise in the “Temptation” entries, who resembles someone I know in real life. I don’t know why I chose the name. It’s just the way it came out. Somehow, it doesn’t reveal her essence. I could have named her Suzanne, because she reminds me of Leonard Cohen’s character of the same name in one of his most famous hit songs in the late 60s. This lyric particularly resonates:

Now Suzanne takes your hand
And she leads you to the river
She is wearing rags and feathers
From Salvation Army counters
And the sun pours down like honey
On our lady of the harbour
And she shows you where to look
Among the garbage and the flowers

She has all of those bittersweet contradictions that go all the way through her personality. But you somehow feel reduced to the role of observer. I can only really stand by the sidelines, along with the rest of the outside world. She looks at life from inside a glass menagerie. The world looks in and sees that it is all kind of fake. But outsiders are cut off. And maybe we don’t even exist. And it’s heartbreaking in exactly the way Cohen writes it.