when I first met emma, her hair was long. like most girls our age, i presumed she was holding on to something and it lived in her hair
or at least I imagined that had she cut it off, her brothers would have looked at her with pain stricken eyes and said your beautiful hair!
but emma’s hair is short now. it tickles her shoulders and explodes like the fringe on a vintage leather jacket when she dances.
emma flips through the pages of a bookand sips her coffee from a white ceramic mugshe plays piano in the air when she talks.her fingers remind me of a teenage grandma,all black nail polish and fine lines and turquoise rings she probably found at the antique store on the cornershe has this way of using her hands to point people in the right direction…it captivates me.
emma is blonde,but blonde in that i grew up using sand as shampoo kind of way.
she wears western hats,and checkerboard skater shoes. she has a dog named dutch,and a mother named nancy.
emma teaches me how to hold space. she sends me a playlist of her favorite worship songs. we clink our cactus shaped cocktail glassesand make commentary on passersby.
emma’s front door is always unlocked,and it’s because her apartment building has had eight different managers in the six months she’s lived there,and they never gave her a key that works.but secretly i think she would leave it open anyway.
emma knows how to make things grow.she has a nomadic strut and she drops little seeds behind her heels, rarely stopping to look behind her and see the field she caused to bloom.
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