The crowd bustles along in a slow fluid mass down the wide city street winding through the labyrinth of cold, grey buildings stretching into the cold, grey sky like modern versions of the Tower of Babble. Was it always like this she wonders as memories bubble up from the depths, memories where the sun’s warmth washes over her like waves lapping against the shore, washing away the past and the future, away troubles and fears, leaving Thalia free as a fish in the open ocean. She could almost feel the water’s caress, but then her worlds collided. The crowd had stopped, and she had run into it; absent minded as she was, she hadn’t noticed that they’d stopped at a cross walk. It was always like this she thought. Always. She could never get it right, always wrong, always walking when she should be stopping, stopping when she needed to walk, and then when she did move, she moved in the wrong direction, a crazy direction, following a compass pointing south-south-east to nowhere. And that’s just where she was going people said.
“Nowhere” She said unconsciously aloud.
“Excuse me?” said the man in front of her. Was that the man she ran into? He stared at her blankly expecting an answer, but before she could give one to him, assuming she could find her way out of the maze she called a mind long enough to give him one, his eyes widened and he asked excitedly, “You’re Lily Rose aren’t you?”
Thalia sighed softly to herself for it was an old question, a tired question, a tiring question, a question she’d been asked by more people than there are grains of sand on the ocean floor. And just like sand it was annoying and gritty and it got everywhere, contaminated everything so that she could always feel it. Always. She felt it under foot while she walked, in her mouth when she talked, in her clothes when she moved, beneath her eyelids as she slept. Or tried to.  It was hard to sleep with Lily Rose beneath her lids, irritating her from within, and for that matter being awake wasn’t any easier because not only could she feel the sand beneath her skin, but she had to carry it around, take it along on dates and job interviews, on vacations and in crowds; it wasn’t easy, to say the least. It wasn’t easy so Thalia simply said “yes”
“Wow,” the man said smiling. And then he turned around.
The light turned and the crowd began moving forward once again. All except Thalia who was fixed in her past, which didn’t feel any different from the present because it was always like that. Always “are you Lily?” Always “wow.” Never what “How do you do? What do you do?” People knew her immediately and never had to ask who she was. Never what did she do when she was off the set, when she wasn’t pretending to be someone she wasn’t, and she wondered if she was just a face on the machine, a ghost in the crowd. And again she didn’t have time to answer for the crowd in its forward surge had slowly loosed her from her moorings on the side of the street and swept her along with it towards their mutual destination.