TAKE IT EASY • TC ✔️

7: Solidified Aspirations (Almost)

"Are you sure you know how to get there?" Lucia's mother's voice pierced the silent atmosphere of the apartment.

"It's a fairly big building with lions in front of it, Mom, I'm pretty sure I'll know if I'm not in the right place," she allowed herself to laugh.

"I just don't want you ending up in the backstreets or anything, Lucia. It's not safe," her mother reprimanded, and Lu rolled her eyes.

"Yes, well, I promise not to go anywhere sketchy."

"Good. What are you wearing?"

"The white top and my black trousers."

"The ones with a stain on them from Lilith's birthday dinner?"

Lucia shut her eyes. Here we go.

"Yes, the very same," she said pleasantly, teeth clenched behind her smile.

"Oh, Lucia, you can't wear them, they're horrible."

"Thanks," she mumbled bitterly.

"Wear something else. What about that skirt I bought you before you left?"

"Didn't pack it."

Her mother began to protest, and Lucia shuffled to the kitchen in her heeled boots, chucking a handful of peanuts into her mouth. She crunched loudly into the receiver as she bent down to zip up her shoes, knowing this would greatly annoy the noise's recipient.

"There wasn't enough room!" she protested enthusiastically.

"Don't talk with your mouth full."

"Didn't."

"Look, Lu, if you don't like the skirt, I'll sell it."

"Go ahead. Don't care. I'm going to be late. Speak later."

"Lucia-"

But the call had already ended.

---

With a little help from Timothée, Lu had already planned out her route to the main branch of the New York Public Library. She'd met him in passing in the corridor a few days after the bed-building fiasco.

Following a few queries into the quality of her sleep (which, thankfully, was now much better) he graciously granted her request for directions. Lu felt slightly guilty to be relying on him for all these favours, but Timothée wouldn't hear of her using an app, just in case it crashed, or this, or that; he had handwritten a list of directions, which she'd found slipped under her door when she woke up that morning.

She wasn't expecting it, and the sight of his pencilled scrawl across the paper made her smile. She tucked it into her trousers, shrugging on her backpack as she left her apartment. That was another factor which meant her mother's skirt could never compete; the thing didn't even have pockets.

Lu managed, miraculously, to navigate her way around central Manhattan, only having to stop someone for directions once, when Timothée's handwriting proved too swirly to be considered legible.

When the lions came into view, Lu smiled. She could only just remember being here around twenty years ago, at that time no taller than the length of the lion's forearms. She'd gambolled up to the statue and stood looking at it for a while. Lucia's mother had recalled her asking two of the library staff, very politely, if she could name the lions, and they had very patiently explained that the lions were already named.

Apparently this had put a damper on the rest of the visit, but Lucia didn't remember this fact at all. She often wondered whether her earliest memories were really memories at all, or just stills from photo albums contorted into living, breathing images. Warped by the mind into something tangible, something real which holds so much more meaning than simply ink on a page or pixels on a screen.