Melancholy: my name

Melancholy, my name. 
If I need to be named after an emotion, I would choose melancholy. It sounds so sweet to the ear: melan-koli. The word is a beautiful poem, it has music in it, a certain slow soft rhythm. It has beauty in it, written in a flowing cursive hand, with just the right amount of sweetness, sadness, and a pinch of longing perhaps.
Unlike other non-sunny emotions, my melancholy carries no bitterness. Again I won’t call it an emotion, it is rather a disposition passed on from the womb, from mother to child, and if the child is a daughter, then to the next generation until no daughter is born anymore. Perhaps, something that is passed on perhaps to the firstborn daughter, sort of like a legacy.

Melancholy was my mother, in some ways. And was my maternal grandmother. I am my mother’s firstborn. My mother was my grandmother’s first daughter. My grandmother, though the youngest, was the only girl in a family of nine siblings. And beyond that, I do not know.