Searching for Miss Raquel and Violet Gems in the Static
I don’t know her last name. I don’t know if she is a singer on a forgotten 1980s vinyl pressing, a character from a Japanese visual novel that never got translated, or simply a figment of a fever dream I had during the lockdown summer of 2021. All I have is the aesthetic: the violet gems . Searching for- Miss Raquel And Violet Gems in-A...
If you ever find her, don't tell me the URL. Just tell me what shade of purple she was wearing. Searching for Miss Raquel and Violet Gems in
In my mind, Miss Raquel wears a velvet choker with an amethyst. She stands in the corner of a poorly lit arcade, the kind with sticky floors and the smell of ozone and popcorn. The "violet gems" are not literal. They are the way the light hits a CRT monitor. They are the tears on a clown painting. They are the specific, melancholic hue of a sunset in a Wong Kar-wai film. If you ever find her, don't tell me the URL
I typed her name into the usual haunts. Spotify returned nothing. YouTube gave me a playlist called "Lo-fi beats to commit tax fraud to" and a tutorial on cutting gemstones. Google Images offered me a thousand variations of purple quartz and a stock photo of a woman in a red dress. Wrong woman. Wrong color.
Tonight, I stopped searching. I turned off the blue light. I looked at the real sky, which was a deep, bruised indigo. And I realized I found her.