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NEW YORK CITY DEPARTMENT OF PARKS AND RECREATION, GREAT TREES OF NEW YORK CITY
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IV. THE GREAT TREES OF NEW YORK CITY, PT. I
It's nice to meet you. I'm Peter Parker.
Juliet looked down to Peter's outstretched hand, hesitating. It was rare she met new people; rarer she met new people she liked, and rarer still that she met new people who liked her. To Ezra she'd once called herself a misanthrope. At best, that was a joke and at worst, it was an excuse. An escape—an exit, right down the halogen-lit hallway of the human condition and out, out, out into the open air. It was a Void, in its own way; any form of isolation was.
Life, living, and all it entailed—Juliet no longer understood it. She felt a separation between herself and the world, and the people who lived so effortlessly within it. It was as if she were a signal and something was scrambling it, as if there was white noise wherever she went, keeping her from the world, cutting her clean off from it.
It wasn't like she didn't want to be a part of it. But she had spent so much of her life hiding—so much of it convinced she was invisible until invisible was what she became. To let herself be witnessed again, to let herself be seen—
Humiliating was just one word for it. The Void existed in Juliet's mind and in Juliet's mind alone, but sometimes she wondered if—like many of her illusions—it had somehow bled through into reality. The Void, infinitely empty and infinitely lonely. She could feel such an abyss between her and Peter now, invisible but impenetrable nonetheless: a boundary she could not cross even if she wanted to, and for once, she knew for certain that she did want to. It made her feel fifteen again, jealous of Arden and her beauty, her charm. If she wasn't happy with herself, her sister could just escape—into a new body, a new face. Or, alternatively, she could simply change the one she had already, make it good, make it better, make it right. Tug out the fraying threads of her existence and tie them together—or better yet, cut them off—to make something neat, something beautiful, something new.
