I can still recall the first time I saw her cry. Not dramatically, like you see people do in the movies with tears freely falling from their eyes and the world coming to a screeching halt. Hers were little, almost uncertain, like she was dipping her feet in the water before leaping in. It is what attracted me to it, her vulnerability. Well, I thought it was love, or at least the raw aching connection people whisper about in coffee shops and on subway rides. I was wrong.
She was Emma, and there was something about the way she entered a room that made it brighter, but also somehow heavier. There was something people found irresistible about her warmth, but underneath that, I detected a vulnerability that made me feel protective: I felt like I could hold her up with nothing more than my hands and my words. She had lived a lot — she told me a bit here, a fragment there, during those nights when the city was too still and the world outside felt like something I had read about long ago but never came across.
We really met in the oddest way. Part of a mutual friend’s party, the kind where nobody knows anyone, everyone plays up like they do. I was clumsy, babbling in conversations, pretending to be interested in things that I wasn’t. And there she was, standing at the window, looking out at the cityscape with a drink in her hand…
