Feeling Darkness | Violentine

Chapter 1

What does it feel like to be surrounded by nothing?

And I'm not talking about not having friends or not having a place to live. I'm talking about literal nothingness. How would one cope with that? What's it like, knowing that there's so much out there for someone to experience, and having actually experienced those things for the majority of your life, and then have all of that taken away in a split second?

Violet knows.

Violet Adlon has been blind for a year now. She was always afraid that she'd be alone or forgotten, but now all there is around her is loneliness, literally. Nothing is worse than your worst fear becoming reality, especially if it's an infinite amount of times worse than you could've ever imagined.

What surrounds her isn't just darkness and loneliness, it's complete nothingness. There's no black and there's no white, there's just... nothing. How does one person just simply not see anything? How is there just 'nothingness'?

People that still have their eyesight can actually somewhat replicate this experience. For example, force one of your eyes shut and use your other eye to focus on something. What does the closed eye see? Nothing.

When Violet went blind, she first described the experience as 'being lost in a dark cave.' There was darkness, but not nothingness. Now, a year later, she doesn't even see the darkness. She's just stuck inside her own head.

Because of her disability, Violet has many struggles in her life. At first, she had to go to many hospitals, doctors and therapists. But she couldn't. Her parents didn't have insurance and also didn't have to money to afford any treatment. And it's also not like they really cared at all.

Violet's birth had already been an unlucky accident to begin with, which led to her parents, especially her dad, to disregard her and actually treat her as an accident. A piece of trash. A burden on their lives.

Her dad's neglect is what led to her 'becoming' this way. Right after she became blind, her parents, her dad once again a lot more than her mom, started ignoring her more and more. Her father started drinking even more than he already did, and her mother was breaking under all the stress that was put on her.

The fact that they'd never lived a luxurious life didn't help either. They lived in an old trailer somewhere in West Virginia. The ghetto was filled with mostly white people who failed in their lives. None of the residents ever graduated, there are pregnant teenagers roaming the streets and kids around eight years old that were already hooked on cigarettes, et cetera. All the people that weren't from the trailer park, avoided it at all costs. There had been plenty of shootings, and that there were plenty of meth labs wasn't exactly a secret, either. Even before she went blind, Violet didn't really have contact with anyone inside the trailer park. While her parents might be extremely trashy, she didn't want to be a part of it. But of course, she was still under eighteen, and was forced to live in those shitty conditions.

Violet's trailer was one of the more expensive ones, though. It was slightly bigger than the average residence in the park and it had been maintained a lot better than most. It was something that Violet's grandfather used to love doing. Every six months, he'd give the trailer and the pavement in front of it a good power wash and would do a bit of gardening. But he stopped doing that once he passed away, which was around the same time that Violet joined the unseeing.

While Violet likes to imagine that the trailer still looks good and well maintained, she highly doubts that it is. Every night, she can smell her dad smoking nasty-ass cigarettes on the front porch and she hears the clattering of beer bottles being broken against their small pavement. She could also hear her dad curse violently every time he tripped over an item lying on the floor, since the house became completely trashed after her accident. Nobody in the household seemed to give the slightest shit about anything anymore. There was no light and hope in their trailer. Just neglect, hate and abuse.