My hair does this on its own. It waves, it swoops to the side, and the grays coming in follow the same line all the way down.

That’s not why they call me Wavey. But it didn’t hurt.

The names

Wavey isn’t my first name. It isn’t even my sixth. Each one showed up because something in my life made it necessary.

Maikito / Maikol. Maikito is what you’d call me if you were family. That name arrived with love already attached, before I had to earn anything. Maikol is what I made of it myself. Ages six to eleven, I spelled my own name M-A-I-K-O-L, because English had just landed all around me and my Dominican ear wrote down what it heard. That’s the kid—before anyone handed him the rules. One name given, one name figured out.

Marion. Started in middle school, grew up beside me, and was fully itself by the time I graduated in 2012. It was the name I wrote under, online and anonymous. It gave me room to say things I wasn’t ready to say with my birth name attached. Marion carried me through college and kept me close to my own feelings after I lost my grandmother. That name taught me to turn feeling into writing.

Microwavey. The handle. There were dozens before it: MSN Hotmail screen names, Tumblr URLs, Twitter @s, a LINE ID. Most of them didn’t outlive the platform they were born on. This one did. Every other name here was handed to me or built in private. Microwavey is the one I picked out loud, over and over, until it stayed.

Mike. 2016, twenty-two, out in the working world. Shorter, easier, harder to misspell. You hand people the simple version so they stop getting it wrong. Mike clocks in.

Michael. Thirty-one. I moved out, stood on my own, and for the first time all of these stopped feeling like a crowd. Michael is the one who holds the rest together without letting any single one run the show.

Wavey. This one I didn’t pick. I gave my Pokémon Go mutuals my IGN, Microwavey, and they had it clipped down inside a week. The word already meant something in our circle: loose, easy, riding the good part of the night. It fit before I understood why. The hair I noticed later, and by then it was too late to argue.

They gave me the word. I found the rest.

I used to call these masks. I don’t anymore. They’re mirrors. One does the work, one does the feeling, one does the jokes, and none of them is the whole me. Wavey is what happens when they line up: every mirror catching the same light, on the same wavelength.

That’s the name. That’s what it means.

Who’s writing

By day I’m in oncology pharmacy. Sterile compounding, IV bags, the kind of room where the math has to be right because the patient is waiting. That’s the day job, and I take it seriously the same way I take writing seriously: people are on the other end of what I make.

I was born at Sloan Kettering and raised between Dyckman Street and Baní, Peravia. My güela Luz taught me what a flag means before anyone ever showed me a Jolly Roger. My summers were Dominican and my school years were New York public—Bronx Science, Hunter, the kind of education where the real syllabus was the train ride home with a borrowed library book and a Game Boy.

By night I write about anime, manga, comics, hip-hop, Pokémon, LitRPG, and the long tail of internet fan culture that raised a generation of us who learned critique from forum signatures before we ever heard the word criticism. My bylines live at Manga Mavericks, ComicsBeat, and Toonami Faithful. I co-host two podcasts, run press credentials at conventions, and have argued about Pokémon movesets at two in the morning. Both of those are research. Wavey Canto is where I do the work that’s mine: the long essays, the Sunday column, the stuff that doesn’t fit anywhere else because it wasn’t supposed to.

The reading list that made me: My Side of the Mountain in fourth grade taught me that a kid alone with his attention is already a writer. The Autobiography of Malcolm X in seventh grade taught me a life can be testimony. East of Eden senior year taught me that a sentence can carry a whole inheritance. Sophomore year of college I read Paradise Lost and Passing back to back and learned that the most dangerous question in literature is who gets to be seen as themselves. Junior year I took creative writing and read Emily Dickinson and Junot Díaz in the same semester: a poet who built whole cosmologies inside a dash and a novelist who taught me that footnotes could be a form of love. Díaz is the one whose voice I keep finding in my own, the way you catch your father’s laugh coming out of your mouth.

Why “la Nave”

A nave is the long open hall of a church, the part where everybody sits. The word comes from the Latin for ship, because the builders thought an upturned hull looked like a roof. So a nave is a room and a vessel at the same time. A place that holds people, and a thing that carries them somewhere.

That felt right for a front door.

Canto puro

Wavey Canto is the name over the whole operation. Canto means three things at once, which is the point. In English it’s a section of a long poem. In Spanish it’s I sing. In Japanese, カント is Kanto, the first map I ever memorized.

Puro is what it looks like. Pure. Uncut.

So the phrase is the pure song, by Wavey. Which by now you know means all of them at once, one wavelength, one take. It’s a signature and it’s a standard. If it isn’t true, it doesn’t go out under it.

Bienvenido. Pull up. 一生に読もうぜ。

Canto Puro, por Wavey.