Identity

[Kahlia Winchester]

[Note: Deets in this thread!]

She looked up from a lean against a lamppost, imagining herself at the top of the highest buildings in Manhattan as she had always done from her earliest memory as the sun lazily, yet dutifully rose behind them. In a near-religious silence, she watched from within the valleys the innumerable tall structures made as those structures stood like stoic statues of the financial undead in pursuit of the ultimately elusive coin. These edifices, for so many years in the magic of her childhood, used to awe her. She imagined, once, that they were giants turned to stone and glass by some godlike being of the earth, angry that they were growing in number and taking over her body like a cancer, and she tried in vain to fix them to one place.

These days, they were becoming strangers. These days, in her mind’s eye, she could see those constructed, emotionless, lifeless, grotesque beasts swaying in the wind like the trees of Central Park in a storm. Lia had come back to this place to visit old friends, to run her hands and eyes over the places of her younger years like she was some old woman. On the surface, it looked as if nothing had changed. And in spending time with old friends, it sounded like nothing had changed. It was Lia that had changed, and coming back to this city was like grasping at fading ghosts.

Being in Los Angeles as of late had been more exciting by comparison to her prior life in New York, what with everything that was being attempted in the state of California as a whole. People like her were feeling the effect more and more of being something that was as undefinable as love, and was just as much a thing they had no control over, had no choice in being. This thing that had changed her life, had made her mutant over mundane, could make those buildings sway, in theory. It was tempting, but she was better than that. She believed as such. She looked like a freak, a punk, a clown by choice. Some days, it seemed, the book could be judged by its cover, and other days, what you saw was not what you got. Pushing off from the lamppost, she began walking to Central Park.

She thought of her friends… well, the one person who she was certain was a real friend, José, and she hadn’t even seen him in any span of time that could be called ‘recent’ or ‘lately’. Fishing her phone out of her jacket pocket, she tapped in the passcode and thumbed through her contact list, coming to the entry for the Flores household - last she checked, José hadn’t a cell. Staring at the list of names in there, her thumb hovering over the relevant entry, she suddenly found herself considering whether it was wise to be calling at this hour. It was only six a.m., eastern time, and though the thought of harassing José awake (if he wasn’t out all night, himself, or at Redención House) in the middle of the night, waking him up and listening to him horribly groggy gave her a twinge of perverse glee… on the other hand, it wouldn’t be nice to his mother to do so. Sighing, having been brought up well enough to not make the call, she locked her phone and stowed it in her pocket again, her eyes forward and straying only occasionally to look on the people of the city that never sleeps as they begin their return to work for another day.

Entering Central Park, she only wished she could actually make the trees sway. That would be within the realm of realism and less likely to get her in major shit. It was always a source of dullness that her apparent abilities did not work on anything organic because it meant that no matter how much she loved zombies, there was no way she could be the Zombie Queen.

And, of course, it looks like the trees are mocking me for my lack of power over them. Yeah, fuck you too. Fuck you, trees.

Lia slipped her hands into her pockets and kept to one side of the path as she slowly meandered her way through the park, giving the morning runners and joggers ample space to pass.