Peace In Chaos

to new beginnings

Chapter 1: to new beginnings

As the words on the screen slowly became less clear, Violet Holden found herself looking down onto the street below the new high-rise apartment she had just moved into. The building's seemingly oversized windows created the perfect excuse for the procrastinating writer. She studied each blurry car that passed by, committing every make and model to memory. Her apartment was located on the twenty-seventh floor - this made everything outside the high-rise a mess of color and pattern. It was the beginning of a late spring, the sun was out, yet the air was cool; the clouds lacked rain, yet the ground was covered in mud puddles from the previous storm; and the wind raged on a strong battle, yet the trees only swayed and the buildings only rocked.

Violet focused on the scene below her - a crowd of school kids walking home, a couple holding hands, the owner of the small flower shop sweeping, a man walking his dog - all seemed as peaceful as the day she moved in, yet Violet knew nothing was the way it appeared from atop of the high-rise building.

Violet slowly made her way to back to her writing desk, sighing. Her apartment consisted of one bedroom, one bathroom, a Galloway kitchen and a small living room big enough for her love seat and her desk; it was the perfect starter home for the college student according to her mother, Elizabeth. Violet's mother had found what she called the perfect place for the perfect price. With the apartment being almost directly in the center of the 50 floor high-rise building, Violet's job as a small scale writer for the local newspaper made the price of the apartment just barely affordable for the student. With the infamous Spring Break underway - and the high-rise's abundance of commodities, such as the supermarket, gym, swimming pool and restaurant just above her on the thirtieth floor - Violet rarely ever left the building.

She soon began to realize that her life was mostly made up of the tiring walks to the thirtieth floor - of course only when the elevator decided to crack under the stress of over 1,000 residents - and the countless, worthless, blank stares at the typewriter. Violet, ever since discovering the glorious values of reading, and later writing, had always wanted to become a famous author. To write the story that will put her on the map and nail an amazingly well paying job so that she can pay back her student loans was Violet's ultimate goal. But this goal was clouded, and unsuccessful.

Whenever Violet lacked the ideas for her next story, she would often wander to thirtieth floor, watching her neighbors, living their highly exclusive lives, become the characters of her next novel. Her wild imagination held Violet prisoner in the restaurant, her mind raced, filling with accusations and suspicions. Her lack in social conduct with her neighbors lead her to believe her farfetched inferences. If a neighbor had come in dressed in a perfectly tailored suit or the highest stilettoes, it was automatically assumed that they lived in the top floors of the high-rise. Violet also began to notice the women that started to linger around the restaurant. Most in their mid-30's to early 40's. All sharing that same focused and desperate gaze, trained and locked on any unsuspecting man that just so happened to walk in that day.

With the smaller apartments located near the bottom floor and the pent houses located at the very top of the high-rise, it was not hard to notice the hierarchy order that formed in the building. The higher the apartment, the more prestigious the tenants became. Towards the top floors of the high-rise, the tenants where strict lawyers, precise surgeons, wealthy business owners, and prestigious doctors; closer to the ground floors were single mothers, stressed college students, underplayed teachers, and other people working for less than minimum wage. Violet laid in the middle, not yet privileged, but certainly not indigent.

One morning, as the sun finally subsided behind the clouds, Violet started her daily chore of sitting at her typewriter. While staring blankly at the screen, she heard a loud, unnerving sound. The sound, almost parallel to that of an explosion, was too thunderous to ignore. Violet opened her apartment door, and leaned over the stairway railing held directly in the center of the floor. Peering over, she saw the cause of the ear-splitting sound, a shattered glass beer bottle. Its contents soaking into the cream colored carpeting, leaving a stain. Violet heard the shouting of a woman, one she noticed from the restaurant. She was yelling at a young man, years younger than her, but seemingly Violet's age. As the scene unfolded in front of her, she found herself locked onto the line of sight of the young man. He was warring a crisp white t-shirt that held a deep V-neck covered by a black leather jacket. His sea foam green eyes held a dull gaze, boring into her. He knew she had witnessed a good part of his argument. Violet came to the realization that he was her neighbor, John Robert, who had just moved in some time last week. Violet, having spent most of her time at her typewriter, had never made the time to introduce herself.

Violet had never been successful when dealing with the opposite sex, having never had a boyfriend, and she didn't know how to react to the gaze of the man in front of her. She was obviously attracted to him, yet she didn't understand why. With his hard look and leather jacket, and Violet's scholarly attitude and goals requiring an overachieving work ethic, John seemed like her paradoxical, a body contradicting her own. Sighing, Violet let her implausible thoughts subside, turning and heading back inside her apartment, sneaking one last glance at her engrossment.

It had been one week since the awkward encounter with John Robert, and Violet still could not shake the feeling that overpowered her at every shy thought of him. These thoughts had also put a damper on her creatively. Before, even with her horrid writer's block, Violet wrote a least 6,000 words a day; now her brain seemed to work even less. Violet, only seeing this as a hinder in her goals, found herself writing about him, as if John Robert was her only muse.

She began to spend less of her time at the restaurant and more time creating a world full of experience and enjoyment and love and John Robert. In this world she was not the shy girl lurking at the back of the restaurant, in this world she was not some inexperienced, naïve girl who had never found her own way; in this world she was the person she always wished that she could be.

Violet's obsession with this imaginary world caused the real world around her to blur and go unnoticed. She did not realize the recent events that had taken place in high-rise. She had spent so little of her time out of her apartment and failed to notice her irritated neighbors who trudged past her door every day, forced to walk up and down the stairs to get to work. The elevators in the bottom section of the high rise had stopped working and the lower class workers not only had to work an average of eight hours a day, but also had to carry themselves up three flights of stairs each day and night.

The upper class tenets, to Violet's knowledge, never left the building. As Violet had taken a notice to before, any necessary needs were adequately managed in the building, so there was no need for them to leave. They ran their businesses from their apartments high in the sky, and spent their free time wandering the top floors. Although they couldn't be bothered to invade the land that was inhabited by those 'lesser' than them, their influence was not absent to those beneath them. The scowls and tired eyes followed them constantly as they rode the elevators into their cloud like towers.

As time went on, and the months past, the occupants strode into tightly wound humdrum system that seemed to go overlooked by all residents. The building started to run like a machine, each tenant became plugged into one hive mind, working in unison. After the lower floor apartment tenants left for work, the thirtieth floor became the playing ground for the upper class. They would use the facilities as they wished until the time came around for the lower class residents to clock out. Then the pool, grocery store and restaurant would remain vacant due to the fact that no one wanted to run into someone of a different class. Lower class stayed in their apartments and the upper class kept to themselves as well.

This went the same for Violet. Everyone abide to their daily routines, never once interacting with one another. But the human brain can only stick to this habit of tedious nothingness for so long until something disturbs the perfect complexity of it.