“Ilona”

“When I think about her now, I see her as one of those stunningly prolific rose bushes from whose every stem erupts a gorgeous flower. Her gifts and charms were almost too much for me to handle. My mind liked to conceptualize people and situations, but Ilona refused to be subsumed under a single rubric. She burst forth in a dozen alluring ways. At one moment she would delight you with her girlishness. At the next, she’d stun you with a philosophical insight. She was the gregarious class president, but also a loner poet, sitting up late at night grappling with the morality of a cruel world. She was a gazelle, quick as light and graceful as a ballerina. She was a bunch of freesias: softly colored, small-cupped, and smelling of fresh apricots. She was the surprise of a stunning headline in the morning paper and the thrill of finding a dollar bill on the sidewalk. Ilona was sui generis, as different from other girls as a single white squirrel among millions of brown ones. She was curiosity personified, creativity enfleshed. She flashed like summer lightning and stunned like a seven-colored rainbow. She truly was a force of nature: she exuded that much vital force from her skinny, long-legged body.”