Recoveress

The dark, the light, the ultraviolet. Violet – that girl walking down the street to choruses of men cheering, every honk her church bell, she taking it in hungrily like some dose of cheap liquer, each street corner a symphony tuned in the key of violeta, veronica, veruka, va-va-voom, every last droplet of her brittle sexuality tainted by this constant input; it attenuated her, and yet like the neon lights that punctuated her urban view, it was what she fed off of.

Violet's rituals: anything chocolate. Tracing figure eights with her hips in front of the mirror to music until she collapsed with exhaustion. Stalking lost men and turning life into a sick dream. Lavender flavored douches. Gold toothpicks. Water was her purification rite, every night and every morning she drank 2 liters of it from a long crystal vase, imagining she might cleanse herself of the city's toxins, the sugar storm, sexual bacteria, eventually dislodging the bowling ball sitting in her stomach.

"Violet, sugar tends to arrest the secretion of gastric juices and have an inhibiting effect on the stomach's natural ability to move."

The unscratchable bitch of her addiction – she always knew better. Every extreme behavior was shrouded by an aura of subversion,

Trolling for quick highs, swim-suited in kitten heels clicking down summer's pavement under hemorrhages of moonlight and stars. She liked to fuck late at night, purring, screeching, twitching, fighting her lovers off like a feline when she grew dry. Men were just one fix among many - coke cocktails, espresso, milkshakes, city the vending machine. As long as she could keep up, the City would be this ever unfolding flower to her. She never came up for air. Her body was her best disguise, and she ignored each of its signals, shock, poke, prod.

If she wasn't physically seeking out thrills she was violently day dreaming about them,
standing by herself with a blank look in her eyes, making absolutely no effort to hide the fact that mentally, she was no longer here or there. Her work day was plagued by a swift, uncompromised long –term day dream:

Synchronized swimmers in champagne, crashing a wedding, breaking china, jet streams, super soakers, sweat soup, fear as romance. Rough fucking her black neighbors with those diamond studded earrings. Clipping squares from the mattresses that lay out for the trash men at night, pieces she would save and one day sew a patchwork quilt that would be a map to the sexual lives of all her fellows in the city. Her favorite trigger was brown hands, tiny brown hands were a reminder of the skinny, brown eyed and silky skinned children (the fantasy usually involved them twirling and laughing) she would have had with him if he had ever called her back. He was the first man from whom she had ever wanted pregnancy; the first time she ever harbored the secret evil longing to use a baby as a trap, a keeper, a currency.

Violet had an alter ego, a strong, quiet, creative girl that rose with the sun, brushed her teeth, meditated, stretched and went to group therapy. It was this other her, not Violet, that held this constant aching, gnawing, depressing insight –

"Violet, that's not boy glitter, that's a rash, Violet you only fall in love when you're intoxicated, your heart beats a little bit faster each day, from the caffeine, your abdomen is swollen, your favorite boyfriends don't return your phone calls, sugar is made from charred animal bones, baby, you're courting cancer like a cheap whore."

This other girl understood Violet desired an unhealthy reality. Every day she went to meetings, sat in circles with strangers, held their hands, accepted them as human beings unconditionally, everyone sober and honest.

She liked this feeling of serenity exactly in equal measure to the way Violet liked a dark storm box filled with hot bodies, loud music, dancing, rubbing, grinding, everyone tilting their heads back in unison drinking liquids and snorting powders as if they were a youth serum.

Violet never had to face the morning light, She walked home victoriously before dawn collecting street trash in her hands, twirling long strips of paper like ribbons in her own private parade. Then exhaustion set in and this other girl awoke in violet's place.

"Violet, why must you accept as normal what you find in a race of sickness and weakened human beings?"

As much as this other girl tried to manage the stewardship of her body at night, to kill Violet, to suffocate her during the hours of daylight with sun, serenity prayers, phone calls to her father, crying in public, plates of steamed kale…she always failed. She dreamt of sewing a cat suit that would allow her to slip out of the house at night as Violet and stay protected from harm, so that she might wake in the morning in good health. Such magic fabric didn't exist. Violet might disappear for days or weeks, but eventually she would always return, because Violet had tricks, blindfolds, mental perversions that were impossible to resist, at sunset Violet would drag this other girl back into her other world, another ecstatic relapse from reality, that dizzying, mechanical coma, whatever vices that had been withheld taken back by force. This girl couldn't let Violet go because above all else, she loved Violet, she idolized her.

there were 2 problems in this world: order and disorder, this other girl, and Violet. The only way to avoid that splitting pain was for both to be each, to let herself and Violet hold hands through each day and each night, a pretty pair.

There would be no killing off, no drying up, no murderess. Violeta, Veronica, Veruka, va-va-voom - stunning, infinite, tragic heroine. Topless with pearls, dancing under the electric lights, glowing, glittering with the residue of her sins, makeup melting, pooling at her feet as if she were a monument, a Madonna, connected seamlessly to the floor – moving statuette, graceful, steady there, spinning, dying.