the_delicacy magicforest welcome. the_delicacy starts in three weeks. 031020 ... Lemon_Soda *puts on proverbial biband reading glasses* I likes delicaceeees. 031020 ... magicforest STORIES FROM THE DELICACY In three weeks, I took John to see the movie. In the theatre I looked at him at a part most meaningful and he began to kiss me. I kissed back with sparkless disillusion, our bodies working over the dirty orange seats. His lips chafed. He smelled like the word sienna. I was disappointed and angry with him. This is when I learned that dates to movie theatres having nothing to do with the male. The only use of the movie is make the girl feel more willing and less cheap, everything else is not the movie but the darkness. The darkness is the liberator. Sleep, which is one of the most intimate activities to engage in with oneself, takes place more often than not in the darkness. I have taken to touching myself in my sleep, not sexually but waking up with my fingers in my ears or holding my knees to my chest. I explained darkness to John. “If you look at darkness with an artistic point of view, darkness is not merely the reduction of light but the accompanying reduction of colour. There is less light to bounce off things and enter our eyes, so there is less colour.” John rubbed the small of my back. “You think too much,” he said, and plowed his nose into my ear most affectionately. The next weekend, John took me to an art gallery. He thought I would like it. I said nothing about the women clad in black hose and the men in tweed with leather on the elbows, staring submissively at the paintings, more concerned with how others would see them then with the art itself. If they looked too skeptical, it would appear that they didn’t understand the art. If they looked too complacent, it would appear that they were ignorant of the true meaning. If they looked too casual, too formal, too intelligent or too stupid they would never meet another patron of the art. John looked at me and shook his head. “You don’t like anything I do, do you.” When we broke up he let me keep his computer. “I don’t know how to use it anyway,” he said, before he started crying. I felt awkward because I was far from tears. I put an arm around him with the same clumsy self-consciousness of two men embracing. Shortly after leaving John, I stopped seeing the colour green. My perpetual rainbow was lacking. I didn’t notice it until I saw the wooden chair in the kitchen which looked like a burnt gray. It was supposed to be green. I stopped looking outside because the balance, even in the deadened white-and-slush winter, was shifted. Too much of everything but that lush, spry colour. I stopped painting until I developed a new affinity for red. But that was the next to go. 031020 ... Death of a Rose small mint of pleasure 031020 ... magicforest Drip. Drip. Drip. It rains outside, apathetic, grey, dark. It does not even smell like proper rain because of the smog. It is part smoke, part fog, part rain. It smells like cigarettes, stains, and something sickly like formaldehyde or methane gas. It smells like suburbian outskirts, where plants—funny name for something that kills them—have sprung up like enormous grey boxes, with nondescript names like Addek and Korma and GIC Ltd, things which should either be letters in the Greek alphabet or friendly Vulcans from Deep Space Nine. I don’t know if they even had Vulcans on Deep Space Nine but Cody liked Star Trek. I spend most of my time thinking about Cody and his small candy-colored kisses. I miss his simplicity, his love like a knock-knock joke, only it was never necessary for me to ask who was there. I haven’t thought about him in a long time, at least, not in a way that was fond rather than something like cynical bemusement. Now I have learned that it is impressive to be a fuck-up, if you were once a pariah, exploit it, and they will make you their king. Nobody likes someone who’s cup is half full, it makes the passerby feel thirsty, in a bad way. Cody, in this respect, was empty of pain. He was almost biblical, not clean by moral standards but dull. I think about him now because if he were here, he would look concerned and scared, like the proverbial puppy dog who’s food dish has been unexpectedly lifted from the floor to a place out of reach, without explanation. These days men do not know more about women’s bodies, they simply think they do. Cody was honest enough to feel awed and frightened by my blood. It is a dangerous thing to have cramps before you have ibuprofen, cramps are not like a stitch in your side from running, but a heavy ache in your abdomen, never fading, sometimes feeling like a fork being sledgehammered into your insides. These pains reduce me to silence and crying, to a soft strained voice that is more breath than sustenance, the vocal equivalent of a dinner roll. I lie under my clothes walking the line between very hot and very cold, letting the prickles wash over me as I clench my blankets and expect death, or at the very least a child being evicted from my vagina. Neither happens, but the ticking monotony of a clock’s malfunction and my own heavy breathing, forced instead of sexual, and this grasping hand emanating from my third eye stealing life from everything in the room. Proximity is everything. I feel sticky and bloodless and clogged. This is the problem with not being sexually active, blood is not relief, it is not a dove, it is not a lifeline. At it can be is an omen. The secret to the blood involves the human species. Our bodies formulate eggs whether sperm is there or not. In fact, our bodies assume that there is a fertilized egg, so you see, we don’t really care if you have splattered yet. Our uterine walls become rich with blood and lining and when we realize that our eggs are not purposeful, the blood and lining need a place to go. Generally this place is eventually a toilet bowl or napkin disposal, although sometimes it finds more creative options like all over the inside of a restaurant via the porous, scant little tampons. I take a drink of water, gag a little, and settle back down waiting for the ibuprofen to start it’s magic. It likes to tease me first. I can only think so long about Cody. He, unlike others, is numbered and finite. I can only absorb so much of him, not because I am not permeable enough, but because he is provisional, he is a non-renewable resource. I drift to Veronica. Veronica had long black hair like from the comic book, only without the streaks of blue. She had a chain on her pants and she cut thumbholes out of a pair of red and white striped tube socks and wore them on her arms. She wore lots of black mascara in a way that was coolly unfashionable and she drank a lot of vodka and tried morphine once. She called herself the crystal meth of the bushido, which I never understood, and she called me the pansy of the safflower oil, which I resented. When we had sex I wasn’t allowed to touch her breasts, not ever, or question about the mysterious marks on her body, which she disguised with temporary tattoos of the macabre; they were temporary because she couldn’t commit, she said, and because she was a bad masochist. Her skin was translucent and silvery and sometimes I wasn’t sure if she was there at all. Her lips were very pink though, both sets, and this told me that inside of her there was something less cold and imperfect than she made herself out to be. She was a bisexual but I knew she was faithful to me because she said she was. We had what she called a mangofuck, which was really coffee, every morning that she slept over. When she slept over we almost always had sex. Almost always, except when she was crying, or started to cry, or would cry eventually, and on those night I held her with our smooth bodies together and puzzled unromantically about her pain. I would play with her long black hair, trying a sort of teasing, but failing because I wanted her more than she wanted me. One of her looks of despair and necessity and my spine would give way and I would be hers entirely. I went from Cody to Veronica, one empty, the other overflowing, nowhere could I find anyone who was full. John could not hold substance at all. It was only yesterday that I lost the colour red. Drip, drip, drip. 031022 ... magicforest The next part begins in two days. claps 031022 ... realistic optimist ooh im in that anxious spot between installmunts... still soaking in the first two, anxiously awaiting the next *drool* 031022 ... Death of a Rose i am the bucket. 031022 ... marked . 031023 ... ? how many days was it? 031110 ... MAGICFOREST I DON'T LIKE PRESSURE. THESE THINGS DON'T JUST BUBBLE OUT OF ME YOU KNOW. MAYBE IF SOME PEOPLE WOULD BE A LITTLE MORE INSPIRING WE WOULDN'T HAVE THIS PROBLEM NOW WOULD WE! SHUTS YOU DOWN 031110 ... werewolf deepheart, take a sweet breath, now kiss me. if the words don't come, they didn't need to. 031110 ... magicforest There’s cold heat and the stores are open wide. Everything is dismally shock-bright and quietly wintery, my eyes are being scorched from their sockets, nothing will be left but some fried irises floating in my aqueous humor, sunny side up, no coagulation in the yolks, protein, here’s to good health, raise those glasses, stream-of-consciousness tangents are the first sign of insanity, the second sign is right behind the pink elephant. Now, back to the news. The world is fierce today. I keep getting in the way. Black bearded men in long buttoned coats with long grey hair and dirty hands are gnawing at me tenaciously, raucously, roughly, full of discourse for me as I pass. If I were skanky their job would be easier but I’m ruefully well-behaved to the eye. Then they brush by, transformed into cloudy stockbrokers of a masculine hard ilk, or cream silk pantsuit ladies with gold bracelets and cellphones and dominating sexual positions like the Terminator which ends in a climax of disastrous magnitudes. The world is pushing me around, I almost run into people, they almost run into me, we move out of eachother’s ways stammering apologies, trying to look hurried yet transcendent, moving on, countless briefcases have jolted against my kneecaps, I am getting claustrophobic and starting to panic, why can’t people see me? Shouldn’t they avoid me? I am in their space… Or perhaps they are in my space? No, that isn’t right, even for Santa season, this is too bright and the sky is too yellow to be warm and too snowy to be cold. Slush almost, in a while. I know that I’m not part of this world. The colours fleeting, the print cartridge needs changing, things are coming out all wrong, my planet is chipping away, chiselled slowly, crumbling from beneath my feet until I will have that perpetual moment of looking down, worriedly, like in a cartoon, before I plummet plummet plummet. Oh god, help me. God help me. I am in their space. I am in their way. I do not belong. All I see are these shapes and I can’t tell if they are people or shadows, but they move around me and jostle me, eyes transfixed on the interior decorating show on the television set at the appliance store which steals their products and would only take cash if they could, bastards, they always think they could do a better job than the professionals, such is life, peanuts and pretzels. I am outside and inside simultaneously, pressed against the wall of the snowglobe but I’m not fucking escaping, as these pieces of snow, blank plastic, run into me blindly. I am definitely, most certainly not here. I have taken to only going outside at night, when no one sees colour and I am soothed by the blacks and the grays. Wandering around this corner here or that one over there I am becoming slowly adjusted to you, this world of fleeting purity. I pass a homeless man with an empty paper bag over his mouth. He seems to hyperventilate. When I pause by him, trying not to glance at him but yet to not be the cruel skirt who ignores the presence, he lifts his head, pulls down his paper bag, and says very deliberately to me, “I have fifteen days tucked inside my eyelids. Some are crumpled and they make blinking feel sore. But until I can exchange them for a foreign beautiful currency, those fifteen days are all I see.” When the sunlight eventually does descend to my city, it is cold and unsympathetic to my plight. Everything looks singed with hell. Fifteen days. Pretty myths, good tales. There will be more I’m sure. 031208 ... marked . 031209 ... u24 i ache for more. 080226 what's it to you? who go blather from