#I'm in Brooklyn practically never. Like a handful of theater performances because fucking TfaNA moved.

[averbaldumpingground]

Song prompt: Ghost - Jacob Lee

He almost doesn't notice him at first, his baseball cap pulled low, slouched in between the tall Hasidic man who's folding up his newspaper and the woman with her curly hair in puffs who's got a pit bull in the duffel bag on her lap. The man's familiar gaze skids past his eyes, the moment catching. At least he thinks it does. It’s lost behind the edges of a wide brim hat and the fluorescent purple cone the dog is wearing. He wonders if it might be his eyes playing tricks.

Before he can be sure, the man gets off the train at Fort Hamilton, fading into the late afternoon crowd and quickly replaced by two kids with a boombox who insist on taking up the aisle until Bay Parkway.

--

He's just getting back from his run, the suits already lined up by the food cart on 46th and Park, the next time that he thinks that he sees him, standing with his coffee to the side, obscured by the foot traffic and the woman pacing with her cell phone at the corner. At this angle, he thinks he can make out a faded logo. It could be a threadbare, white B. Or it could just be wishful thinking. He waits to cross the street, but when he gets there, the woman is signaling for a taxi. An older man in boat shoes stares at him, the recognition flickering across his sun-tanned face.

--

The park is mostly empty this early. A handful of other runners, a dog walker with his headphones in, someone dragging a lawn chair in the direction of the Belvedere Castle, or maybe the theater beyond it. He’s tempted to stop for a bottle of water, an excuse to get his bearings. There’s a bus that’s pulling up on 81st, just the shadow of movement, a sweatshirt that seems excessive for July, even on a drizzly, overcast morning. His water bottle forgotten, he takes off toward the museum. Theodore Roosevelt looks down at him disapprovingly when he loses sight of the shadow that he’d been chasing, the men flanking him an uncomfortable pit in his stomach. There’s no one else there except for the statue and an older woman pushing a stroller, a blonde little boy holding onto her hand and yawning out that he’s not sleepy.

--

After stopping by that burrito place on Flatbush, he’s almost looking for it, looking for him in strangers’ faces: the nurse in green scrubs that hurries past him, the little girls still in their school uniforms jumping rope in front of their apartment building, the man in the wheel chair speaking Spanish to his health aide, who’s got his shopping looped around the somewhat crooked handles. There’s a couple selling mango slices from a fold out table, and a younger man in an NYU t-shirt with a shopping cart that’s overfilled with laundry. He doesn’t want to think about it, moving faster past the group of women in yoga pants and sports bras outside the Planet Fitness, the boy with his grandpa on a scooter trying to reach the ice cream truck that shouldn’t be parked where it is. He almost misses it then, those eyes that land on him, so blue they’re practically frozen, his shout lost to the road construction and the traffic.

--

It’s in Grand Central when he catches him again. Of course, it’s in Grand Central. Too many people, too much noise in the morning commute. He knows better than to bother with it most days, taking the long way past Brooklyn Heights and the bridge, up past City Hall and Chambers Street through Chinatown and turning West toward the Hudson before it’s time to double back for a few laps around the park, and then south again toward the tower, impossible to miss among the other monoliths that take up too much space and too much sunlight. Park Avenue is wide enough that it’s not as claustrophobic here as around what used to be Penn Station, with all of its stores and its tourists and that general sense of unease. He almost misses him then, almost misses the halting way he trips over his Russian, almost like he’s not used to speaking at all, as he points out something on a map to the small group that’s clustered around him, a family with too many suitcases. He—

When the crowd parts enough, when he finally manages to make his way across the atrium, his early meeting forgotten, the family’s still there, but not the man he was certain that they’d been asking for directions. Not the ghost that hasn’t left him alone once, not in these intervening years.

He’s pretty sure he’s not crazy. Not when—

There’s no one there. He’s late anyway, quiet enough the rest of them start to get worried.

--

He knows he could just walk back, enjoy the view from the bridge in the pleasant warmth of the summer finally fading into fall. Something stops him though, tells him he’s better off taking the 6 down to Bleecker and switching trains. He usually knows better than to bother.

But maybe it’s intuition, or some kind of masochistic need to retrace all of his steps, take him back to where he thinks that this started, these glimpses of someone that he could have once sworn was dead.

As usual, the escalator down is crowded. A sea of faces that he doesn’t look too closely at, too much conversation around him. But there’s—

There’s movement out of the corner of his eye, someone pausing on the staircase by the windows. He thinks—

It’s only the barest flicker of a smile, an invitation almost. He thinks that it might be enough, at least for now.