X on X: Kat Lewis on Kat Lewis
In 2018, I received a Facebook friend request from myself. Or at least that’s what the notification on my phone said: “Kat Lewis sent you a friend request.” Since I hadn’t met another Kat Lewis before, I was curious; I went to her page and clicked to the about tab to find that she was also an MFA student. At the time, I had just finished my first semester of my MFA program at the University of San Francisco. She studied poetry and I studied fiction. When I first saw the request, I jokingly thought to myself: there can only be one, that we were in a race to see who would publish their book first and claim the name Kat Lewis. After clicking through her profile, I did the only reasonable thing: a Google search. I typed “Kat Lewis writer” into the search bar, and my website came up first; I had to click around quite a bit before I could find Poet Kat Lewis. Satisfied that I was the top Google result, I closed out of Facebook and ignored the friend request.
A year later when I was living in South Korea, I received the strangest email with the subject line: “Poetry Daily Feature: ‘Still Life with Cat Skeleton’ by Kat Lewis.” I do write and occasionally publish poetry, so that wasn’t the strange part. No, the strange part was the title, ‘Still Life with Cat Skeleton’—a title that I’ve never used before. I opened the email and read a request from Poetry Daily to republish “my” poem on their website. I replied with a link to Poet Kat Lewis’ Facebook page and wished them luck getting in contact with her. Fast forward a month later to AWP in Portland. Waiting for the elevator in the Doubletree, I ran into someone I used to intern for and the first thing he said was, “Congratulations on the Poetry Daily feature. That’s a big deal.” The next day, I gave a reading at an offsite event and someone came up to me afterwards to tell me that they enjoyed my “cat poem” on Poetry Daily.
After the third time I was mistaken for Poet Kat Lewis, I set up a Google alert for my name. Though Poet Kat Lewis hasn’t appeared in any of these alerts, I’ve caught glimpses into the many lives that our name lives. Kat Lewis of Macalester College studies in Amman, Jordan. Hair stylist Kat Lewis teaches how to straighten hair without a flat iron. Kat Lewis photographs volunteers at a nursing facility. Retail clerk Kat Lewis bakes to cope with social distancing. This loss of my name has made me question what I can own if not my own name. Maybe instead of ownership, particularly of a name, we should concern ourselves with what is shared between people. I write to share experiences, and there’s something to be said for sharing that purpose with my doppelgänger.
