A tiny bell chimed over the door as Thalia entered the dimly lit coffee shop, and although the shop wasn’t cold, she shivered. The memory of how close she’d come to escaping sent tremors of energy racing through her body. It had taken a while, but she’d finally managed to pry herself from the crowd on the streets despite the overwhelming urge that had welled up within her to simply keep walking, to get lost in the flow of the her thoughts and forget the hustle and bustle of life, to surrender and let go and simply lose herself in her own head and… then what? What next? She’d thought as fear and desire wrestled within her. The desire had been strong; it had made her heart pound uncontrollably and sweat run in rivers down the curves of her body; she had wanted to, desperately, to keep walking aimlessly knowing that at some point she’d come to the edge of town, and then to the edge of humanity, and at last the end of the world, the climax of creation where it would all be over. It was an exciting thought, tantalizing, but it was just that, she had conceded, a thought, a shimmering mirage flickering on the edge of the horizon, so unreal that it floated above the earth, above her, just out of reach, and she had known she could never have it. Never. She’d be pulled back by life’s undertow before it could even come into focus. And so she’d conceded. Fear had won; the mirage faded; Thalia returned to the grey sky and the cold concrete.
She shivered again and got into line, a smaller version of the one out on the street.  Why, Thalia thought, why do we all want this, what makes this special? But then she shivered and ordered a small coffee. There was never enough time for thinking, never enough time for anything. Never. It always seemed to be running out on her, slipping over her, but that was her life, wasn’t it, not having control, giving up control; being somebody’s b****. And as if on cue, Life called her again.
“Is there a Thalia here?” one of the employees asked.
“That’s me,” Thalia replied. For a moment, the barista looked confused and who could blame her, Thalia wasn’t her “real” name, because after all, her real name was just another thing she didn’t have control over; it was something she’d given up years ago when she was young and free of sand and perky in so many ways and convinced that the world would open up for her because she was the future and she had the power, which is what had prompted her to stop being Thalia when her friends told her that they liked what it meant but that it wouldn’t work in “the industry”, that it needed more, that it needed to tell everyone who she was and what she was all about the moment she walked into a room, and so they changed it to Lily Rose, and Thalia disappeared.
“You know when you first walked in, I was like: OMG she’s Lily Rose,” the girl whispered handing her the coffee, “You look so much like her.”
“Thanks.” But I’m not her, she thought, temporarily forgetting which “her” she meant. She took a sip of the coffee. It tasted of sand. Thalia wanted to scream. She wanted to scream and cry and yell, and break down right there, in the middle of the café with the entire world watching, but she didn’t. She walked to a table and sat down and didn’t make a sound. Because Lily Rose was her fault. Lily Rose was her fault, and so Thalia simply sat at a table in the dimly lit coffee place drinking lukewarm coffee that could never remove the chill from her bones, watching the crowd bustle past, and waiting for the sun to go down. She did have to work after all.