by S Vitrolica

Created on: July 14, 2009

I never got why they insisted on calling me Violet.

If I had been there, or rather had I been able to speak, give me opinion as it were I would have told then that my hair is red, strawberry red actually, and that such an evidently illogical choice could only be an omen, and would surely lead to a series of illogical choices. When a child is born, I would tell them, you have to think of the life, that they, as a person are going to live. You have to set the tone. You have to bless them, crown them with a namesake that will follow and guide them through the treacherous world of dateless proms and first cigarettes. The name should be like a light, like Angeli or Gabrielle or Ocean or Clementine.

I once heard of a couple, Godless atheists mind you, that named their son Lucifer Ram. My soul had shuddered when I was told of the poor tyke's fate. The college boy who told me himself sported a goatee and was himself a bit sinister. We inhaled freon from the air conditioner beside his father's poolside terrace. I blacked out that night, and floated high, far from our gathering, in a place wide and deep and black. Points of light were everywhere, all around me, and I thought of the Bible, and that verse in James and the Portishead song, wandering stars, for whom it is preserved the blackness, the darkness, forever. I wondered if I myself had become one of them, a wandering star, worse than damned, in the place where not even God himself could find me.

Violet. A voice spoke through the blackness as black arms reached out for me, I dodged, repented and cried out to my maker. Mercy, apparently being granted, took form in the blackness parting, and my soul returning to my body, or to my wits, and I saw once again my friend, though at first I was sure he was the devil, smiling, faintly evil yet abundantly friendly, with his devil goatee and hand on my shoulder. His name was Josiah.

That was the first and last time I would do inhalants.

I imagined that Josiah had been luckier than I, with a name that suited him in it's contradictory wisdom. His parents had surely held him in their arms on the day of his birth, 3 years and 21 days before my own, and with tears and chills and a meaningful gaze as they christened him after a man who had, in the Old Testament, rebuilt the temple and destroyed the foreign idols, returning the hearts of the children of Israel to their God. They saw him as he was then, perfect and soft, and their love as their vision of him was forever sealed.

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