Violet.

The smoke swirled so thickly through the air when I saw her for the first time... I could hardly be sure it was her. I say the first time - well, it wasn't the first time. It was probably about the hundredth time in the course of my life. If life is just a series of misguided attempts at being adventurous, then let's just say I've been slightly too cavalier. Then again I consider talking to a pretty girl to be an adventure, I may not be the appropriate gauge.

She was just as I remembered her to be. Violet. Not that she was a shade of violet - that's ridiculous. No, her name is Violet, and it seems to match her persona perfectly. She's languid, thin, with a dark mind and an even darker heart. No amount of booze or cocaine or sex has ever been able to break her. She's dark, tainted, unworldly. If you were to blow in her direction, you'd think she would fall over like a shrubby twiggy tree in a hurricane. She'd actually just stare at you and ask why the fuck you were blowing at her.

Even though she is tainted, she's just as radiant as she always was. She glows. She is as pale as the moon, and whenever there is a light source it finds its way to her. It seems to bounce off her skin, into the hearts of everyone she happens to be around. She's illuminated from within. She is a bug-zapping lamp; I'm a poor misguided junebug. I fly towards her, make it inside just to bounce back, away, battered, fried, aching.

It's always been this way, ever since the very last time I laid eyes on her. It was June 14, 2001. Don't think I'm a creep, this day stands out in my mind because it was the day after I graduated from high school. I was the valedictorian. I got to make a big speech and everyone clapped and shook my hand and said things like "Good job, Charlie, you're going to go far." "You'll do great things, Charlie." "Princeton could use a guy like you, Charlie." But these hollow words of praise rebounded off my eardrums, or better yet they seemed to enter my head, snake through my frontal cortex and then work their way out again. I wanted to smile, nod, push my thick glasses up my nose and be modest but I couldn't. Violet wasn't there, she hadn't been to school for the past month or so.

I know this not because I am creepy - Violet was my best friend. I know. Weird. It doesn't seem like we'd be able to mesh, but we were close ever since I punched a boy pulling her pigtails in the fifth grade. That's the last time I was the one doing the saving.

Why did this seemingly bad girl hang out with a geek like me? Violet wasn't always so abrasive and distant. She used to be just like me. We used to watch The Wrath of Khan and practice Python together in high school. She was a chorus geek, she did band. Art club, physics club, av club. All these were crucial parts of Violet.

And I was also always in love with her. But we have only ever done anything twice.

Once during the summer between junior and senior year Violet had an explosive fight with her father. This is out of the ordinary. I can't remember why they fought or if they made up, but I remember she drove to my house in her rust-spattered VW station wagon and insisted we go sit on the swings at our elementary school. I was unsure because it was past my curfew but I looked into those eyes, so much like deep vessels of lake water, and got in the passenger side door. She had two bottles of some dark, foul-smelling booze in her backseat, and they were making me nervous. Neither Violet or I had ever tasted liquor, let alone drank it. I didn't know where she was going with this.

We sat on the swings for hours before touching the bottles she craftily stowed in her purse. We had made our way back to the station wagon before we made eye contact and each took a bottle. I drank about half. She drank about one and a half.
By the time they were both gone, our eyes bore this heavy, lack-luster sheen and I kept getting urges to reach out for her. She must have sensed this, because she grabbed my face and kissed my lips sloppily. I felt bad because she was drunk, but so was I, and this is what I had always dreamed of. I kissed back, we flopped down into the back seat of the station wagon, our mouths working sloppily together, our numb hands pawing at each other in the dark.

Over the next few days, I waited for more kissing. Perhaps some exchange of class rings or shy note passing. I waited. No more kissing, no more booze, we each kept our own rings and notes.

The last time I touched her was the last day I saw her. June 14, 2001. I went looking for her behind our high school, next to the dumpster where she liked to smoke after she dropped out.

"Violet."

She looked up, smoke billowing from her parted lips like gray waves in a stormy sea. Her lips were the waves, her eyes were the storm. "Charlie."

"What are you doing here? I at least expected you would show up for graduation."

She stared at me blankly. "For what? To graduate high school and go to another school three or four months later? That's bullshit, Charlie. And you know it. I don't want to spend my life chasing ivy league coattails."

Her comments pierced me. I wanted my Violet back, the sunny Violet who smiled at me instead of scowling sourly, as though she had bitten into the proverbial bitter lemon. "I at least thought you'd come hear my speech. But whatever, that's just fucking stupid right? Your best friend gets to make a big, important speech at your graduation, but to Hell with him. He'll be stuck in a yuppie existence for the rest of his life."

I picked up my eyes to see if she was looking at me. She was. I expected her to be glaring at me, to smolder the way she was capable of, to pierce my heart for good with her eyes. But she looked... frail. Sad. Scared. Human.

She flicked her half-smoked cigarette onto the asphalt, calculatingly grinding it into the blacktop with the toe of her boot. She took the same boot and stepped forward with it, slowly, like a fawn taking it's first step. It took her all of five steps to make it over to where I stood. Once she got there, I expected her to stop a few feet in front of me, but she didn't. She stepped so close that the bridge of her nose could brush against my chin. She looked at me pleadingly. "You're really going to go far, Charlie."

She stood on her toes and kissed me. It was neat, no hands, no tongue, just lips. She tasted like cigarettes and cheap strawberry wine, but the fact that the lips on mine were hers made them taste sweet. She pulled away and I leaned in for more, but she got down off her toes and just looked at me. She walked to her car, pulled out, and drove away, out of my life. For what seemed permanently, until tonight.

When she made eye contact with me, she smiled and made her way through the sweaty, boozey crowd and leaned against the bar across from me. At first she seemed like she almost didn't recognize me; I had grown much more attractive since she had seen me last. I wasn't a gangly, awkward teenage boy anymore.

"Charlie." She said my name as though she had seen me yesterday, and every other day for the past nine years.

"Violet." I was having trouble being as nonchalant as she was. I felt like all the blood was rushing out of my face and into my stomach. My hands and cheeks were cold by the time she was able to say "Let's get out of here."

I couldn't hear much as she led me out the door into an alley beside the bar. I wasn't really surprised or shocked as she pulled a key out of her small purse, fit it into a lock in a door in the alley, and slipped inside. She beckoned for me to follow. I wasn't surprised she lived over a shitty bar.

My blood was whooshing about in my ears as she sat me down on the couch. "Hey." She said almost sheepishly, setting down a mug of black coffee on the beat up coffee table by my knees.

"Hey." I said, staring at the walls. I couldn't look at her, not yet. I may pass out.

"Charlie." She said, pressing my knee with an extended finger. "Charlie."

I stared at the wall for an increasing amount of time. I was not actually there, I felt distant from myself. As if I was blowing around, watching myself from above. I could spend the rest of my life trying to describe the sensation, and it would never be accurate.

She sighed and stood up, taking her mug with her into the kitchen. She was getting creamer or something, probably.

But she stepped out of the kitchen with her mug. As she walked out of the small kitchenette and into the living room, moonlight from the skylight shone on her pale, exposed shoulders, wet moonlight glistened on her red pout. I knew I couldn't keep going on without her.

She sensed my urgency and dropped the mug of coffee onto the cracked hardwood floor. Before I knew what was happening we were on each other, like animals, desperately clutching and ripping each other apart. Because if we let go then the other would disappear.

"Violet." I whispered through her quick, violent kisses. "Violet."

She murmured into my collarbone. "Yes, Charlie? What is it?"

"I need some answers." Thinking was becoming difficult with her all over me.

"Can't they wait? I'm here, right? That's what matters." She was slowly unbuttoning my shirt, trying to work her lips onto my neck and chest. My mind was quickly being consumed by her, my hands instinctively snaked their way over her breasts. She smiled and exhaled onto my mouth.

"No... Please Violet. Please tell me why you left." She was still kissing me, my shirt unbuttoned, her voice was a small, broken reply.

"I... I guess I just..." She pulled back slightly. "I just wanted to start living." I felt her syncopated teardrops on my chest and on my cheeks.

I thought for a millisecond, then grabbed her waist and pushed her down onto the couch. She gasped, but smiled up at me, expectant.

I leaned down and kissed her softly, for real this time. 16 years of emotion flowed through our lips.

My mouth lingered over hers. "We all have to start sometime." She exhaled onto my lips, smiling sweetly in the dim light of the city through the window. I smiled and worked my body behind hers, clutching her in the darkness. Through her, a life seeped into me, spreading like ink on wet paper and enveloping me warmly. I pressed my lips against the back of her neck, her body shook with tears and complex, bottled-up emotion.

I kissed the back of her head and whispered into her hair.

"Welcome home."