Her parents named her Emily, but she seemed more like a Lily to me with long hair the color of a summer beach and eyes the color of the summer sky over that beach and a smile that takes the place of the sun that lights that sky and warms that beach.
And she had this laugh, ya know?
It reminded me of when I was a boy and was running with my friends, playing tag and chasing each other and thinking about nothing but playing tag and chasing each other. And we would laugh and laugh and laugh the high pitched, unmeasured sounds of un-adulted joy that really can only come from the mouth of a child.
And her…
But the best thing about Lily was the way she breathed in the people around her. Absorbed in the words and the lives and the beating hearts of everyone she encountered, she wanted to see the reality of humanity. Though her words were small, her talk never was. I had heard a conversation she had with a boy from New Jersey where she never asked his name or occupation but by the end she knew that his mother survived cancer, his sister was kind of a bitch but was pre-med and would absolutely be successful and that his first love left him when he played her a song he wrote and that he has never written another song for another girl since.
He fell in love with her that night. I could see it in his eyes and the way his fingers twitched with desire to trace her jaw line and dance along her arm and play a song that he would write for her. Everyone fell in love with her because she was real and made you want to be real and honest and to open your chest and point to all the places on your heart where it hurt and to open your head so you can show her all of you ideas and thoughts and desires. And you want to show them to her because you know that she cares and that she would take all of that stuff and hold it so carefully, so lovingly. You know that she knows that she can’t make it all okay, that she can’t make you happy, but that she believes that all that stuff is important because it is important to you and that she can show you the way to happy. That was her heart. Endless and vast and full of beauty like the pictures of far away solar systems that someone would die for the chance to experience.
I know I would have.
-MjM
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