dear violet ➳ andy biersack (currently editing)

38

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chapter
thirty eight
violet

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"What do you say we keep up old traditions?" Andy asked around a crooked smirk.

The show was well over by now, and we were standing on the sidewalk around the back of the stadium.

The sun had only just set, and the world seemed to glow a magical shade of purple, like iridescent lavender.

Andy extended his hand towards me, his long slender fingers and chipped black nails waiting.

He said, "Why don't you let me take you on a tour?"

• • •

Andy knew the routes of the city back to front from getting lost on a family trip over the summer at sixteen, as he told me.

We were jogging down narrow side streets framed with bowing palm trees and alleyways swathed in bright paints and scribbled graffiti, climbing up the sides of buildings to sharply arched rooftops where smoke puffed out of crumbling brick chimneys.

We were running hand in hand with no set destination, just enjoying being alive.

The skyscrapers of Miami glowed and glittered and shimmered with a million different colours, all of them soaked up into the sky.

A warm wind chased my hair around my face, kissed my cheeks.

But at one point I caught both Andy's wrists and stopped him beneath a streetlamp.

God his eyes were so blue.

What an inexplicable blue, what a surreal shade. The global silky ocean at the dawn of time, the tired yet thrilled sky swabbed of stars like the surface of a mirror on the first night of december.

He was panting a bit, velvet black hair falling into his ivory pale face. I reached out a hand to slowly brush those strands away, and to let my palm cup his cheek.

He leant into my hand and sighed, eyelids fluttering slightly.

How insane was it that I was in love with a rock star? How insane was it to be in love at all?

Andy mumbled, "I think a lot about the wrong and right. I mean - whether I'm doing the right thing in a general sense."

His face was clouded by a knotted sort of doubt. But there was no space for that here, no time for self-inflicted poison now. That was all over. Said and done.

Now, we needed to believe in ourselves in order to believe in each other.

Now, we needed to love ourselves in order to love each other.

Because that was how love worked.

There was no fixing each other, no healing each other's scars like in all the books. Oh no. It was more complicated than that. We both had such traumatic pasts, and there would be no wiping them away like condensation off the side of a window.

Instead, we would fix ourselves and help to fix each other in the process. That was healthy. That was functional.

And so Andy didn't need to worry about constantly doing the right thing around me.

"Trust me, you're not the only one," I told him. "We're all just trying to wing it." I paused. "You know when, sometimes the wrong is right and the right is wrong? It all just depends. There are no rules. Only the ones you set up for yourself. It all depends on the moment. Andy?"