I used to hate dress-up. From being the one kid in class who at the school’s book fair put on a slightly striped jumper and went as Charlie Brown in Kindy to refusing to wear the aprons while painting at
preschool, from a young age, I avoided all kinds of clothes that were outside my repertoire. The idea of being forced to slip into another role, even that of ‘Apron-wearer’ seemed like a rejection of my
identity. “Here I am!” I thought, “Is Ben not enough for you?”

My determined clothing inertia ultimately achieved nothing. People change one way or another. The Congo at Malebo Pool may only begrudgingly shuffle forward, but it still moves. Gravity and time inch it forward, the murky quiet water unrecognisable with the foaming thunder when it hurls itself into the sea further downstream.

When people come across major change, it causes different types of reactions, but all react. Sometimes, it can completely and irreversibly change the direction of your life, like a small creek is swept away by the Amazon upon contact. But often, people choose how to react. Some fully embrace the new circumstances, wearing the clothes of the new culture excitedly experiencing a fresh start. Others cling onto what has been, unable and unwilling to forget, greeting others with the ‘Guten Tag’ or keeping the room of their deceased child untouched years after they passed. Rarely do people settle in between. But the latter two cases are more similar than they might admit. A while ago, an aerial shot of the Bavarian city of Passau, also known as the city of three rivers, made
rounds on internet platforms. The black Ilz from the north and the milky green Inn from the south meet the dark blue Danube flowing eastward, the direction the other two then also take. For many kilometres, the colours travel side by side, unmixed like the different parts of an ice cream sandwich. How did people decide what to call the river that emerges?

Despite the Inn contributing more water than the other two combined, the resulting river that flows through Vienna, Budapest and many other important cities takes the name ‘Danube’. It’s identified with the name of the smaller dark blue strip going in that direction before confronted by the change. How different would it really be if the new river was named after the important factor ‘Inn’? Although the light colours take up three fifths of the water, it is not the entire thing, either.

Rivers have changed names multiple times in the past pretty unaffected. But how much does a name or label affect individuals? Shakespeare of course is right when he says, “That which we call a rose,
By any other name would smell as sweet” but would Romeo, whom the rose symbolises, appreciate his last name being something like ‘Receding Hairline’? If nothing else, a new name might make him
grumpy in Juliet’s prescence. And in the long run, don’t we react deeper to these labels? Desperate not to be seen as bogan, carrying an imitate-English accent or to not be known as a snobby private school kid, raving about four-wheel drives and country music.

Sometimes rivers get called a completely new name at the collision of the two, acknowledging how the new river differs from its two tributaries. The White Nile and Blue Nile simply become the Nile and the rivers Brigach and Breg become the Danube. Likewise, in certain cultures, for instance Medieval Japanese, people gain new names after different experiences. Personally, I am so glad that that isn’t the case in 21st Century Australia. Sometimes I have bumped into people I knew a while ago and despite both of us changing, us recognising each-others’ names sparked the memories we had of each other again.

But so often, names can seem like fossils of you, associating you to who you were when you last met. The dark waters of the Danube crawling through the caves in Western Germany are only a fraction of the input that makes up the wide, lighter waterway surrounded by boulders in Romania. Old friendships can be rekindled with the help of the names, but until you tell them of what has shaped you in the past, they only know an outdated version of you.

Eventually, the black, blue and milk-green waters merge. It is much brighter than it was and unless you spent your life at the Inn, you couldn’t tell its waters darker than theirs. But it still carries the name
Danube and it still is the river Danube.