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Four Sketches 1: She came hurtling out of someplace where you wish you could have been. Something about her sometimes radiated: here shined a spirit simply brighter than the one issued the dull gray-faced drone you felt yourself in comparison, even if yours brightened to a shiner, more glittering gray as a consequence. Not that you saw her as a spirit -- far from it. She was a person, a tangible being, with plenty of hair, retro-stylish glasses, and retro-stylish smile. Someone else might wear such glasses and such a smile as a kind of mask, a cheerful one; as a façade over nothing much. These things had a bit of that look. They looked like the outsides of a person almost too naturally happy with life and at ease with herself. Yet they also had the look of being hard-won but ingenuously displayed trophies of happiness wrestled away from a life that must have weighed as heavily on her shoulders, if not more heavily, than it did on you or anyone else. People do not carry these trophies without winning them; and even when they win them they do not always display them in full to a doubting and rancorous world unless they are insane or else truly, truly sincere. You did get this feeling about her: you saw her as sincere, as sincere as could be. No one saw her otherwise. She could not have carried this off easily. At times she made it look as though she did. 2: She must have been an unevenly shaped stone full of good, solid, crystalline material, tumbled in a rough world, and made beautiful by that tumbling. She had a gleam which was not only of her smile, which you could not copy. 3: She must have been a swiftly delivered message to you, an important one, that, just as with most vital messages, you could not take deeply enough into your heart, at least not quickly enough.
4: She must have been that selfless friend and cousin you never had, living in the house where you were always welcome, where you were always interesting, where you were always noticed -- a house she, too, may never have had, but which she seemed to be trying to build, and which she then swiftly and ever so unexpectedly swept away, to a place where you wish you could go.
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