Lily walked down the street and couldn’t decide if she liked the day or not. It was windy, and that part was refreshing, she supposed, but she was often forced to pause in the middle of the sidewalk to rub the dust and flecks of crumbling leaves brought on the breeze out of her eyes. She was indecisive about a lot of things and had always been that way, according to her father.
It was a Friday. Lily called in sick to work that morning for no reason in particular; she just didn’t feel like showing up. Besides, it was nearing the end of the year and she had used very few of her vacation days. Vacations would require Lily to decide on a place to visit and she felt there were too many options. Instead, she would take days off just to walk on streets that felt less crowded than on the weekends.
She looked up at heavy gray clouds that sat perched low above Brooklyn rooftops. It was supposed to rain. It was always supposed to rain. Thirty percent, fifty percent, whatever. Rain was always on the horizon, whether or not it came didn’t matter; people found comfort in thinking they knew.
These days it seemed as though she lived in a definite world filled with educated people guessing their way into book deals about global warming, North Korean nuclear power, and the overfishing of our oceans. She watched pundits talk on the television with voices filled with conviction and fingers that pointed accusatorily. Everyone was sure of everything and all of it was bad. It was exhausting to think about, really, but in a way, knowing that she wouldn’t be around in another sixty years was a great relief. The world was a temporary problem because her life was a temporary gift.
Lily, however, was convinced of nothing. Politicians lied, news organizations were biased and polarized, histories always turned out to be watered-down versions of truths. Nothing in her life had ever been a sure thing, no matter how well-planned or fraught over
She walked down Manhattan Avenue quickly, passing sluggish, aging Polish women wearing orthopedic shoes and handkerchiefs over dry hair. She often felt guilty when she did this, as though walking at her speed was rubbing the misfortunes of old age in their faces. Getting older made Lily nervous. She often found herself thinking about how easily her limbs glided, how she was able to jump into a sprint if she needed to, how she could climb subway stairs without holding the handrail or wheezing when she reached the top. When she thought these things, she was overwhelmed with an acute appreciation for her youth and the anxiety that it was leaving her. She caught her reflection in a storefront window where they sold Hello Kitty and other plastic junk; stray hairs framed her head like a windswept halo, her features discernible under tight and elastic skin. “Fuck,” she thought, “I don’t want to get old.”
Her parents were divorced and had never remarried, both destined to remain immovable in their own ways for the rest of their lives. Lily could never decide what made a person happier: the company of a lover you had to make sacrifices for or a single life, fashioned to your liking. Lily enjoyed being on her own, but she thought that might change as she got older. Being young and alone did not seem to share the emptiness of being old and alone. There were always friends and social engagements and distracting flights of irresponsibility. To Lily, this was youth. But as people aged, their connection to the outside world seemed to shrivel into a small concentric circle of family and forgotten hobbies, bi-annual trips to Disneyland and shopping for Christmas presents at the local mall.
Lily started to sweat underneath her wool sweater – she hated that about the cold season, how she could never escape her unrelenting body heat, how her body regulated to save her from external elements. She had made her way down Bedford, next to McCarren Park, which was starting to look a bit sad. The fallen leaves that had once been punchy statements of red and yellow had faded into forgotten shades of rotting peach. Lily looked over the tennis courts to where the buildings receded enough to allow for a view of the city beyond. The same dark clouds wrapped around the Empire State Building and she remembered watching Ghostbusters with her brother when they were kids, sitting close to an old TV built into a faux wood entertainment unit, the laminate peeling away to a black plastic beneath.
Her brother had the Ghostbusters Fire Station, a plastic toy building with vents at the top through which you could pour green goop that was supposed to be some decimated ghost. The goop made her mother nervous because of their white carpet that already had plenty of stains on it, so they rarely used it. Her brother had a lot of Ghostbusters paraphernalia, now that she thought about it, even though she no longer took him for a Ghostbusters type of guy. Now he was a twenty-five year old with a beard and a body like their father, stocky with big arms and a broad chest. He wore boots and dated girls and he often returned Lily’s phone calls weeks later. It was hard to remember that they were once just kids who fought over the remote control and tried to bite off each other’s fingers.
As the leaves crunched underfoot, Lily recalled a pillowcase with a glow-in-the-dark ghost on it. It was her brother’s and she hadn’t thought about it in ages. They used to share a room, back when her parents were married, and they all resembled something close to a family. Soon after that memory came another one: this of a plastic box with a cord attached to it that you could pump open –- part of the “Proton Pack” or some nonsense. The thought of her brother running around the house chasing fake ghosts made her laugh.
She would always have her brother, or at least she would have him the longest. Lily was sure of that, mildly sure. That sureness, she supposed, was hope.
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