Emma Ingrid Muse had two very separate, very beautiful eyes. Her right eye was a bright green, like grass after it has just rained, while her left was the blue of water. It wasn't always visible; sometimes you needed to be somewhere with really good lighting to be able to notice it. I always told her how weird that was because blue and green are quite a contrast, and yet it wasn't always so obvious on her face.
The name Emma means 'whole, complete, universal.' That was the one thing she never felt she was. She always thought there was a missing piece in her, one nothing could really fill. No person, no words, no emotions. It was utterly and entirely just this black hole inside, she said. And I got to thinking that maybe the black hole was the one that finally tore her apart in the end, from the inside out, which I have come to consider to be the worst way to go: to have something that is literally made of you become the thing that kills you.
Emma liked her blond hair short, and once coaxed me into cutting it for her. It was a terrible mess, but she loved it, like she did most things. She had cut my hair two times and she was just as talented as I am at doing so.
She once dyed her hair red. It was on impulse and she thought she looked awful, but she didn't regret it at all. She went nuts trying to get it off her hair for the next five weeks or so.
Emma had the tiniest hands I'd ever seen with my own eyes. No one I knew had hands that could compare to the size of her palm. I could hold both her hands in only one of mine. Emma loved reading. No book was ever bad for her; she liked all of them. She thought that meant she wasn't such a good reader because she couldn't make judgments about what makes a book good or bad, but I think it only meant she could always see the silver lining of every bad situation. She could turn a horrid book into a masterpiece inside her head.
Emma's mind was a chaotic one. No, chaos doesn't even begin to describe it. Her mind was never at rest, even when she was asleep. Thoughts were always swirling about in her head, unstoppable. There were times when she'd call me in the middle of the night and tell me about all these fantastic, unthinkable things that no one could ever conjure. Sometimes she'd talk nonsense and I'd drive over to make sure she wasn't doing anything stupid.
Sometimes I wondered how she became the person that she was. An oxymoron. Fearful and valiant, reserved and rambunctious, wary and impulsive. One moment a calm mountain air and the next a rising tide. It was never boring with her, even when it should've been. She's the kind of chaos I would readily submerge myself in again and again, even knowing that one day I might not be able to surface.
