Young Writers Society

Emma was a particularly close friend of mine... actually, maybe that's incorrect. I didn't know her very well at all, but it seemed as if I would always seek out her company over anyone else's. I did not know very many people here. Nobody likes to be alone but I never tried to become anything more than an acquaintance with the people who inhabited my blurry dreamscape of a world. I suppose I was being foresighted, never allowing disappointment even the barest of thresholds. But Emma, she was different. She offered me catalytic comfort and I'd spend many nights with her, walking around San Francisco in our knock-off heels while smoking, talking, laughing, and sometimes just reading the same meretricious advert and challenging each other to make as many four letter words out of the cloying catch-phrases. She frightened me a bit, but it was an exotic and exciting breed of fear that kept me continuously chasing after it. She was beautiful in an untouchable way, a poisoned apple that's dripping red skin suggested both a delicious interior but a sinister kick that would ruin you if you allowed yourself even the smallest of tastes. We talked about everything, nothing that mattered you understand, just things we always wondered about.

"What happens when you fall while dreaming?" I would ask Emma, taking a sip of my sloppily spiked Coke that was dripping down the sides and catching the light of the midnight neon.

"You could wake up." She took the Coke out of my hands and took a deep sip." You could fall to your death. " She answered distantly as she threw the empty can into the street, reflecting the mist that rose out of the manholes in the depths of her dark eyes. "You could fly." She looked at me, relishing the thought as she rose clumsily from the bus stop bench, straightening the besequined cocktail dress that hung awkwardly from her skinny shoulders. "What do you think Rachelle? Should we fly or will we fall?" She laughed. It sounded like she was crying though, emotion bubbling forth with such staggering energy that made me want to kiss her.

Did I love her? It didn't matter to me that she was a woman. She whistled when she was sad, she could look so alive even while doing the most mundane of tasks. The other day I helped her clean out her apartment, a chasmic hole in Chinatown that held more strange, perplexing and glamourous things than I had ever seen. Even my trip to Jakarta the year before paled in comparison to what she had accumulated here.

"Look at this old thing," she sighed, holding up a lonely looking, but no less exquisite, chopstick I had just uncovered from behind her gas stove. Its gilded pattern was fading away in the ancient jade. She suddenly burst into tears but as I tried to calm her, she pulled back. Usually when confronted with someone who is crying, one would expect the noble thing to do would be to comfort her. However, when that person is trying hard to hide their tears...is the noble thing to do is to pretend not to notice them? I looked away; such emotion was beyond my comprehension. She met my eyes and smiled, tears cascading down her cheeks. "Don't worry about me, something was caught in my eyes." She carefully wiped her heavily powdered lids with a tissue. Indeed something was caught in her eyes, I saw myself in them. I looked lonelier than ever before, but somehow I looked happier as well. Emma carefully twisted the lone chopstick into her hair and admired herself in a dusty mirror. She turned to me for approval.

"You look pretty." I said slowly, wanting nothing more than for her to hold my gaze for 10,000 years. She laughed, dismissing my compliment easily.

"Take it Rachelle, what am I supposed to do with it?" She grinned and slipped me the meaningless stick as carefully as if it were her heart.

It was unfortunate, that year, when Emma left San Francisco to "experience the world." Those were her very words. The day at the airport, as she leapt out of my red Sedan, she looked more distant than ever. She begged me to walk her to the terminal, her ebullient joy was so vivaciously channelled that I was afraid she would break her ankle as she almost charged into the airport in her scarlet espadrilles. She was talking, saying so many things that all I heard was noise. She would laugh if she heard me say that.

"All anyone hears is noise!" She'd smile, kicking her long legs up onto the ripped seats of one of those red trolleys running up and down my city.

I watched her from a spectators seat, hanging back into the crowd of those leaving and those left behind. The last image I saw of her was her turning her head around, swinging her radiant black hair in the air, looking for me in the maelstrom of people. She blew me a kiss and shouted out a good-bye of some kind. Then she was gone, leaving nothing but heavy, disconsolate silence in my entire being.