| How I wonder what you are |
[29 Oct 2009|09:49pm] |
I am admitting that I sliced my arm open on purpose and that I liked how it felt. I like how it felt when I got my lip pierced. I don't care that it looked ridiculous. I enjoyed pulling on it.
I like feeling. I understand, and...
That's really all I have to say on the subject.
I said on this journal, sometime in the past that I liked looking at dead people. I remember 3 years ago, just staying up finding pictures of the inside running out and wondering what happened just before that one moment. I feel terrible when people suffer. Nobody deserves it. There is so much empty space out there and so many people who do not need to be alone. There is the cold bathroom tile and the warm car seat, places people run to.
I got a job cleaning. Cleaning the inside that comes out.
A company that cleans hazardous situations. Accidents, murders, injury, suicide. I went on 2 different jobs, but I am on call for others since I already have a full-time job and can't be there all the time. I am considering it though.
I think I found something I really like doing.
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[16 Sep 2009|02:56pm] |
It has been 1 year and 4 months since I have heard Goth/ Industrial music or been in a place where people identify with that sort of thing. I know nothing will erase the 15 years of it that I forced myself to endure for stupid reasons and that makes me angry with myself. I wasted so much of my life hanging around a group that never really accepted me but were supposedly all about accepting differences. Hypocrites.
This just comes into my head sometimes and then I get horribly, violently angry.
It's not OK.
There is a reason people are attracted to that sort of thing- and it's because there is something very wrong with them. No, I don't mean they're dark and mysterious and weird. I mean they have actual mental disorders that make them unable to associate with others in a normal, functional way. That is not OK. There is no "To each his own" with them because what they do does not work! When will it die and how can I help kill it?
Then I feel kind of bad (such a small amount of bad it's almost invisible) because I have friends who still participate in events that require those antics. I am fearful of being invited to a party or a trip which will include this kind of worthless waste of a human being, and I have to decline the offer. If I feel it is harmless enough I might go and just not talk to anyone. I just don't want to ever feel like I am being kept on the outside of something that I never cared enough about to be a part of. It's really not a good feeling. It's offensive. I guess anyone close to me will just have to accept that.
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[13 Aug 2009|02:32am] |
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What are you supposed to do?
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[13 Aug 2009|12:42am] |
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Does worrying whether or not you are a Sociopath negate actually being one? Just because you are aware of it...?
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[05 Aug 2009|02:37pm] |
I really hate it when anyone becomes fixated on my breasts.
I enjoy it when they are touched, but at any other time I would rather forget they are there.
They make me feel trapped inside a purpose I do not want to fulfill and have no interest in. I wish they would get smaller or disappear when I am not "using" them. They make me feel forced to be seen as a milk-bearing-animal-cow-mommy-babymaker-sexmachine. I do not want to define myself as any of those things, but the fact that I have breasts instantly makes me be seen as one of those first before anything else.
Honestly, I think breasts are disgusting. They are overgrown glands attached to a person's chest. I mean, eew, seriously. Just bend me over a bucket and squeeze me Mr. Farmer. Squeeze my Gland Bags ooh yeah baby suck those Mommy Udders mmmmmm.
If it is censored and considered illegal and explicit, then it automatically becomes desired sexually. If you can be punished by the fullest extent of the law for showing it off in public, then you can assume it is something you can have sex with or have sex around its close proximity.
If you can see it whenever you want without the risk of being jailed or fined, then, it is in NO way considered to be sexual or sexy, and is ignored completely.
We all know censorship has the exact opposite effect on the people they claim to want to "protect" from sex. That's the point really. By hiding, eliminating, and incriminating a woman's body the result is of course the complete opposite effect, making these taboos all the more desirable and sexually explicit.
Make my body mysterious = make a lot of money while having a depraved excuse to treat me like Mommyslutcow.
So, why can't women be exposed? Other societies see boobies all the time and think nothing of it, so in that case, boobs are not sexual.
Exposing and using the breasts as nature intended makes boobies no fun... Hooray for boobies and Hooray for all the well crafted and misleading laws and censorship that has made boobies all the more mysterious and sexually arousing than ever before! Thanks, censorship, for enhancing the size of the boobies popularity. Boobies-boobies-boobies...Hoooray!!
Dirty little lumps hidden under moral and ethical rules.
I wouldn't get them removed because I really don't want a huge scar across my chest. And I like being female. I love the way I think and the way my body fits with a male body. I certainly would not want a penis. Though I also have my complaints about the vagina too. I don't like that it doesn't close. Having a Vagina is like having a perpetually open wound. It leaks and is susceptible to all kinds of infections and imbalances. It's just not efficient. And why is the clitoris so far away from the vagina? Who thought that one up?
I just want to be human.
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| Suck My Caps Lock |
[23 Jul 2009|12:16pm] |
What the fuck is "book smart"?
I suspect it's faux contempt when someone calls me that. It actually hurts when it comes from someone I care about and intellectually respect. It's a phrase that is meant to denigrate scholarship as if it is a species of knowledge inferior to first-hand knowledge. People say it when they are feeling insecure. I NEVER want to make anyone I care about feel insecure- just by being who I am. That really hurts.
I mean, it's not even TRUE. Seriously, I don't think I have even finished more than 10 books all the way through my entire life. I like the IDEA of books as being these little packages of information, but nobody really learns anything applicable or useful by reading a book. You have to actually DO. Get out in the world and DO, and that's how I know most of what I know. Even people who actually are VERY smart have called me "book smart". And sure maybe they can't list a bunch of theories about 18th Century Ciceronian Psychology, but I happen to respect someone's "smarts" even more when they DON'T know things like that. If they can speak intelligently from their own experiences and come to healthy, rational conclusions about the world- THAT is really sexy.
So to think I am being nothing but inviting and respectful and enjoying every moment of someone's company and conversation and still be met with "...well, you're book smart" feels like an insult. Not a malicious one, but an insult that comes from their insecurity and my unintentionally intimidating them. Underlying the phrase, subconsciously, all they want is to knock me down to some level of equality (which I already feel I am at). And that's fine OK that's human. The animal feels threatened and they snap back with all the teeth they've got. Fine, I get it. But they are not aware of why they are saying it! So if I confront it they claim they are just pointing out how I am different but "in a good way".
Saying I am "book smart" also sort of negates the value of any life experience I have had. I have done a lot in my life! Coming from someone who knows that, it really doesn't feel all too wonderful..
I am never forceful (even though I am perceived that way) or angry or raise my voice, I never even use negative words. The way I am perceived is totally different though, due to the insecurity about my intelligence level being so skewed that I end up being the bad guy. I understand though (and that makes it worse, actually) nobody enjoys feeling threatened in any capacity. I am not saying any of this out of ego.
I hate me sometimes.
The first time I wished I was the same as everyone else I was about 11 years old. My friend had a party celebrating our entrance into Middle School and she invited girls from all different parts of town, different Elementary Schools. I didn't wear the latest fashions, my parents always encouraged me to be creative. Though my clothes were new, they were not what the other girls were wearing. Plus, my idea of an interesting time was not pining over boys and The New Kids On The Block. I cut a picture of David Bowie out of the newspaper, even though I had no clue who he was and I would carry it in my pocket because I though he was cute. I would sit alone in the crawlspace under the kitchen with the camping lantern reading about Jim Jones and all the bloated bodies, from a paperback I stole from the library. My parents walked around naked and sold cocaine out of our house until I was 10. By then I had seen the entire USA from the back of a baby blue Subaru Station Wagon.
I HATE THAT. I want to go back in time and just be normal. I want to be something people understand! I spent the whole night at that girl's party crying to her mom, who was a very sweet lady, about how mean they were to me for being SO FUCKING WEIRD!
No matter how intriguing I am or how beautiful, sexy, smart, different--- How many times I have heard that men like that about me is just as many times as it has caused rifts, problems, abuses, wandering fidelity, break-ups or just plain contempt.
I want to be easily digested. A blow-up-doll with a pull string that just says movie quotes. OH MY GOD I WANT TO BE THAT SO FUCKING MUCH!
Or just love me and know I am never trying to deliberately intimidate or overpower or correct or be forceful in any way. If I have information I'm just gonna say it. It'll just come out. I want to contribute. I am not the enemy. I am not out to get you or make you feel stupid. If you feel that way anyway, it probably has nothing to do with anything I did, but how YOU perceive me. I am not responsible for how you perceive me, so don't blame it on me. Just keep in mind that I am not attacking you. Just listen. Consider. You don't have to agree, that's not why I say anything. I don't care if you agree or not. There is no wrong or right. I am not arguing. I just see that there are many ways of looking at a situation and yours is just as relevant as mine. Often, I am just talking because I am trying to understand. I like understanding different points of view- that's why I ask so many "weird" questions. I enjoy learning and I am very curious.
YES I REALLY REALLY DO MEAN THAT!
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| Show and Tell |
[11 Jul 2009|04:15pm] |
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Fiona Apple- Extraordinary Machine |
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Who is the person that first thought it was a good idea to have a private diary in a public place? People really don't want to hear your insides. To everyone else, no matter how well they know you, you will always be partially imaginary. And it will always make them uncomfortable to know more than they want to know. And you can never tell where the level of enough disclosure is until you make them uncomfortable.
This is true.
Except not for Pete.
Pete says he likes the movie version of New York City. Ice skating near the giant Christmas tree. Everyone is wearing a hat with a fluffy pom-pom. In Times Square people are huddled against the cold in expensive, long wool coats, while the pretty girls are being proposed to in a restaurant that costs one week's salary. I say: "But, it was never like that". He says: "I know". And I know he knows, but I don't understand what the appeal is if you know it is not real. I like real things- even the uncomfortable ones.
The other night I was a bit upset. He was exhausted, but said "I'll stay up if you feel like talking about it". This is real. He does not think differently of me for revealing.
We are laying in opposite directions on the couch with our feet touching. Ghostbusters 2 is a terrible movie. I am explaining to him why I think this when...I realize he doesn't really like it either. He likes the romantic depiction of New York City in the movie.
I remember the field trip to the surgical theater when the doctor opened up the foot and peeled back it looked like wires, roots.
I wiggle my toes against his. This is real.
Viscera Impulse Muscle Skin Body
I remember the time I went to the city. Walking so much that day my feet were swollen. At the top of the 8th street stairs in Penn Station a man died of a heart attack and the EMTs sat in their van waiting for whoever picks up bodies to come. People were just walking over him. I don't think they realized he was dead. His foot was bent in a weird position. People kept rubbing up against it because there was no room. They kept walking.
That is the city to me. It's really just as romantic as lovers ice-skating.
Recently, someone wrote "you are who you fuck" as an anonymous comment in this journal. Thanks. I thought about it. Why do I have to be something? Because thinking I am a whore makes it easier for you to hate me, to disconnect? Fine! Whatever works for you! Thinking I am a teacher or a mother or a stripper or a curator makes it easier for people to understand me?
No. I want to be nothing. I think Nothing is the most real I can be. Not any one thing. Everything.
Nobody will ever know how serious I am about that.
NOBODY.
And if you are who you fuck, then I consider myself lucky.
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[10 Jul 2009|12:35pm] |
Why do I have to be something?
The sun feels good.
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[29 Jun 2009|12:54pm] |
I quit my art gallery job. Except for a few months 5 years ago, I have never really been happy in that industry.
I have no desire to be a part-time fake and lately I just can't do it. I love talking to people and going out to parties, but having to always seem agreeable and stroke egos...I was never really good at that.
And I don't want to be!
For years I have been saying I want to continue studying Nutrition and finally get my certification, but I had been afraid that I would not be able to get a job. Well I did! I am going to be working as a Dietitian and Personal Trainer at a fitness center and finishing my certification. I don't remember ever actually being excited about any job. I hate working. 10 years ago, I wrote on this journal:
"Where do you see yourself in 10 years: Hopefully slicing cold cuts at a Supermarket and living in a trailer."
I would still love that life. Maybe I'll work up (down?) to it.
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[04 Jun 2008|01:16pm] |
Is it weird that I have no ulterior motives for anything I do? Whatever the gesture is on the very surface is exactly what I mean by it. Does that mean I am not deep and complex? I think this aspect of me confuses people because most others are trying to manipulate situations under the surface.
I just want the people I like to know I like them, and I can get vehement about it. Whatever it is I feel like sharing with you is exactly the thing it is and nothing more. I float.
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| ...and I've often been told that you only can do what you know how to do well... |
[03 Jun 2008|11:32am] |
I am so good at making up excuses and convincing myself and the rest of the world. I knew all this already. It doesn't really make the way I feel about anything in my life any different, just more intense, and bigger. Just opens more. There is only one thing that I know how to do well. Everyone I meet teaches me something. Aggie, if you ever figure out how to get paid for being a muse, please let me know.
Ellie, please come get lost with me.
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| ... |
[08 Oct 2007|03:51pm] |
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A muse is a thing that will die over and over. The life ends, but the moment goes on.
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[01 Oct 2007|05:54pm] |
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Is life worth living if nobody is watching? If nobody is there to truly mean it when they say you are astonishing, beautiful, amazing? Is life worth it if nobody is intimidated by you- if there is nobody left to believe you are outlandishly unique? Or is it up to you to keep up the act? Is it really an act? Isn't everything? Isn't that what love affairs are for? To make you feel better? Not so "weird"? Yeah, it's worth living until it isn't anymore.
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| Edit Me |
[01 Oct 2007|05:29pm] |
I am feeling dark. I don't feel like making sense directly. Been watching a guy on youtube who points his digital camera at his TV- and on the TV are old cassettes of him as a teenager in the 80's doing various performance art. I don't pay attention to the performance though. I like thinking about the space between the TV and the camera. I like listening to the inside of his house. I feel like a voyeur three times removed.
Feels like two mirrors facing each other.
It could be the weather, why I feel this way. Or something to do with the weather at least. Coldness is still the occupying force in the Fall. In Winter it has already taken over completely and is less interesting. Cold demands less attention in Winter, you already know it's there, like a complex flavor, the third bite chewed and swallowed, no longer a novelty. I guess that's the point really. I've been thinking about myself as a novelty lately, something I always have thought was true of me. Been hanging out with more new people. There was a 5 minute pause between this sentence and he last. I don't know what I want to say.
Morning is a new lexicon, its blood blushes silent under the skin.
The rape and pillage of Noon darkens sound, bruises voices.
By Night there is a wall between us
made of entire words, wrung and bloody,
killing the meter and slashing the rhyme
with all our breath.
I feel something is missing. I think everyone feels this way. Acknowledge the separateness between you and those you care about and they will stay with you forever. Celebrate their otherness and love them anyway, love them because of it. I keep telling myself that.
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[10 Jun 2007|04:47pm] |
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Remember when we were young and Republican? I swear everything in my life is completely backwards. I like it that way.
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[21 Dec 2006|12:34pm] |
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MySpace is for dummies. It's too easy---and it reveals to me that everyone thinks of themselves in exactly the same way. People describe their personalities as an eclectic mix of neither here nor there. I'm sweet but watch out if you cross me. I'm smart but I can be a big stupid head. They say that right? Other nonsense: If you're female you have to have a girlfriend you call your "wife". Also giant sparkly graphics of horsies.
Nothing wrong with Dior.
Yes and all the men with terrible spelling and grammar. I don't care how great their abs look, if you cannot use "your" correctly I will think you are disgusting.
I've been lurking on LJ for a while now making sporadic comments and reading entries. Even my old entries---and oh how I do not recognize that person from 6 years ago. I was so insecure! I squandered so many friendships for fear that people were secretly making fun of me. I do regret that. I feel very alone having convinced myself I don't need anyone---and in fact the only thing good about MySpace has been that I can find those people I left behind and attempt another connection.
Life is so much more loosely interpreted now. Emphasis on creativity and personal accomplishment. Romantic love is secondary.
There's just so much empty space out there. And people like planets. Everything outside of you is extraterrestrial. All we can expect to do is harmoniously orbit.
The best thing I ever did for myself was getting off birth control pills. They were making me a crazy woman and I didn't even realize it having been on them for so many years. I remembered a time when I was more level, or at least thought I did. Hormones cloud everything. As it turns out I'm much more sane in my natural state, which is extremely comforting. I very rapidly lost 15 pounds that the hormones were holding on to and I'm back to my long bony self. I recognize this body. Though I haven't menstruated for 5 months. Nice, but annoying. I have to invest in a giant box of EPT Tests. I'm not pregnant. Once I have better health insurance I'm going to have a Tubal Ligation.
My mother has not had a drink for almost a year now. She is battling with finding out just who she is. She never took the time to figure it out without becoming overwhelmed and then attempting to fix it with alcohol. She acts awkward at times like a teenager, which I find uncomfortable. She grasps for a friendship in me that I can't give her---I want to be the daughter and I want her to be the mother. She never really was a mother as I now can see, looking back. She was miserable, going through the motions, trapped in a life she never really wanted. After spending this past year drunk and confining herself to the sofa, denying to my father and I that is was anything more than menopause---then us having to literally drag her to a rehab in the Hamptons---I just don't know. It hasn't really all sunk in yet. I just know that I went through all that utterly alone. That when I needed it, nobody was there.
Well, cheers to growing up!
I'm going to start writing here again. I need honesty right now.
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[13 Feb 2006|08:44pm] |
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July 14, 2001 (begin) - February 13, 2006 (end). December 21, 2006 (begin).
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| There is No Such Thing as a Mysterious Blonde |
[17 Dec 2005|01:38pm] |
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This kind of sexualized passion in everything she does. Attentive language for sex thrown in with knives, needles, razor blades. She does not just make love, sex is a voluptuously dangerous balancing act, a too warm, too sweetly scented addiction. You taste a hint of blood. This kind of --willing to bleed for it-- attitude. She is soft, nurturing, but soaked and dripping with sexuality. Every creative action is bodily.You get the idea that she eats things like music and art, they elongate her body, shrink her breasts and hips to the lines of a smooth horizon you ache to reach, the distance of her always inspires. She is the darkest vessel. It pours out, hands cupped low in the shape of a heart. It takes you in, gives birth to you over and over.
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| The Completely Dull Story Of How I Cleaned Out the Refrigerator and Other Tales |
[05 Dec 2005|05:22pm] |
This isn't fiction, if it were it would be more interesting.
Ground beef was left to thaw in the refrigerator---and abandoned for over a week it began to smell of rotting flesh not permitted to decompose in the warm air of a room, a kind of suicide intervention. Kept chilled as if by some act of kindness prolonged a sour-earthy stench circling the vents in the refrigerator, seducing the organic innocent nature of the milk and butter to come over to the side of death. I found the meat shoved to the back, forgotten, and after disposing of it the smell continued to plague the rest of the food. I took apart the entire refrigerator, zealously on my hands and knees scrubbing---the Death odor is an appetite suppressant---I recommend it to anyone on a diet.
My parents' friends have fallen into a kind of pyramid sales scheme---the kind of thing people desperate for money hand over all of theirs to---claiming you can make thousands by selling organic soap, gourmet candies or vitamins through persuasively oriented "parties" you throw in your own home. My parents were invited to such a party and ended up buying gallons of cleaning fluids scented with intrusive, piney medicinal Tea Tree Oil. This is what I scrubbed the rotting meat smell off the refrigerator's plastic surfaces with. All that happened is that now I associate the smell of Tea Tree Oil with the smell of rotten meat---and I think everything smells of rotting. The subtle tartness of egg and butter in a cookie is now transformed into notes of decay pervading my nose. The salty, saucy remnants of a meal on my fingertips makes me think of bitter, rancid cow's blood. It's beginning to effect me psychologically---or maybe it's my psychology which is effecting my olfactory zones. The mossy undertones in someone's perfume intensify, erupt inside my nose into a heady, rank fungal odor.
People smell like walking corpses.
Everything really is in a state of rotting ever since the day it was made and exposed to air and time.
The furniture, the earth, the new batch of chocolate-chip cookies, yourself.
I can see the smell of death being a trigger of survival, a perpetual ghostly message floating in heavy layers like humidity to repel the living from a place of potential danger. I can see the smell of death, if one is exposed to it long enough being a trigger of surrender to one's own mortality, a depressant.
Monday mornings I go to the town public library before work for around 3 hours and I read. The library has large communal tables surrounded by four to six chairs, and even so, you take claim to an entire table just by sitting at one. Nobody dares inhabit the same table. If you really must: do not make apologetic eye-contact, it will not be welcomed.
Be sure to leave your copy of 'Forbes' magazine on the table as a territory marker.
This morning all the tables had their maximum occupancy of: one, so I sat in one of the low outcroppings of cushioned chairs in the research section. This is the usual spot of a man I always thought was slightly retarded. He comes in at 10AM and sits there wearing headphones and nodding off. He's scruffy faced and his clothes are dirty, too small, a stupidly round head. Today he sat down there not even a few feet from me and I found out what he was listening to: employee motivation cassette tapes. He produced two padded yellow envelopes, which were stamped and addressed from his backpack and took several cassettes out of them.
He had it turned to a deafening volume in the quiet library:
"People who spend too much time making important decisions get walked on.
They end up like dogs whimpering away with their tails between their legs."
The man sat and stared at me while I read my book for 10 more minutes until it made me uncomfortable enough to get up. I, of course, didn't let on. I wonder if he was thinking of influencing me with some of his newly learned business tactics. Why is he there for all those hours?
I wonder who thinks the same of me.
My notes from the library:
Solstice, page 123, 147 "greatly aggrieved"---
work the idea of grieving as remembering (an old life/ a life given up) into Alaska North Dakota.
Find passage in old LJ post on visiting one's own grave.
The realization of life's perpetuating itself as a reason for suicide.
The smell of rotting.
I haven't even looked at my e-mail in days.
I'm afraid I won't have anything to say to anyone.
For all the encouragement and advocation of Life I do for those I care about, it very often arrests me that life has an aching and permeating potential to be unsatisfying and disappointing. I believe wholly in the things that drive those I care about, but how can I not seem like a hypocrite when I cannot deny the futility that lays beneath---when I laugh at it even. This is why there is no such thing as a celebration of Life without acknowledgement of this absurdity. If you meet someone who seems too sweetly optimistic, they must be either disabled or secretly crying.
Yesterday Steve and I went to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. We started with the etchings that influenced Van Gogh. I hadn't known he was influenced by both etchings and photographs and it constructed an entirely new perspective for me on his liney painting style, which had less to do with impressionism and more to do with an appreciation of the functionality of the carving done for an etching. The dark and light blocks of color and meticulous gradation made of tiny lines in etchings also similar in early photographs with their striking brightnesses and shadows.
Then we walked through the new Mumler--occult--spiritualist photography exhibit. Some artistically nice compositions of people pictured with skeletons and smokey apparitions of beasts and Hebrew letters---people spitting up lengths of cheesecloth (ectoplasm) and representations of what would later be called a Ray-o-Gram.
Then the Prague exhibit, where because of the mood I was in, I finally realized the hilarity and egoism of the last years of the Holy Roman Empire while observing an extremely expensive pitcher carved from a solid piece of rock crystal, given to Charles VI. He was also given a cloth which he was told was the tablecloth from The Last Supper----which he proceeded to shove into the pitcher as a kind of display case. The cloth is on display as well. I liked the revival of St. Luke as a symbol by the painter's guild of Bohemia. St. Luke never really got a lot of attention, the underdog, getting stuck with the sacrificial bull as his animal symbol in Early Christian iconography. Luke appears several times in the exhibit.
http://www.metmuseum.org/special/Prague/view_1.asp?item=4&view=l
Master Theodoric is the only person who is allowed to paint my portrait.
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| Alaska North Dakota |
[28 Nov 2005|07:38pm] |
Conflicted people are everywhere. People leading the lives of spies. Maybe your mother never really wanted to be a mother, and while she vacuums she dreams of the house she would own, hidden in the snow of Alaska, the book she would write, the uninhibited heroine living among the drifts. You would never expect it, but the guy who mows your lawn knows all about Neurosurgery. When he turns the flower beds, the root systems are Fibrous Astrocytes, stones intrude blind as tumors---he sees more mind in the ground than he ever did in anyone's head.
Your ex-girlfriend, she was also a spy.
I know you suspected where she actually went all afternoon.
We are not at liberty to reveal this information to you.
There are two of me, you know. I bet you didn't realize it. I feel I can admit this to you without you looking at me like I have two heads, two hearts. There is an internal Siamese that draws me to run away from my home and change my name.
"Nobody will find you," she says, "you can be me and I can finally be you.
Everyone vanished is revealed somewhere else."
I have a first and last name. I am a newspaper editor and I am somebody's wife, I went to college for six years and I live in an affluent suburb of a large city---this is what I am every day. The expectations of this existence are of little value to me, it is a life I never asked for. I dream of who I might be if, for example, I changed my name to Pam and waited tables at a truck stop on a transient expanse of highway in North Dakota. How I long to be that anonymously unloved, uncomplicated. My greatest expression in scribbles on slips of paper to a short order cook. Two voices: the spin of a wheel, the ringing bell. Nobody would suspect their plate of was handed to them by an impostor. My backside would feel real enough when they pinched it. From a place in my center, folded under the beat of organs Danielle would smile, free. There are certain things you can never ever say to anybody or they would surely think you are a lunatic, but I remember you.
I know you from somewhere.
We met in a magician's audience. I am the lady who got sawed in half. Remember? You are the one in the box that gets stuck all over with swords. I trusted that big serrated blade, sucked my abdomen flat in anticipation of the cold silver nibble of its teeth---and I surrendered myself in two. The pressure on my soft middle, a pulling, breaking of skin and the warm rush of being split apart.
Easy as a haircut. I felt much lighter.
When I opened my eyes, my feet were next to my head swaying to distant music. You were standing over me. I could see right through the hole in your forehead. We were still on stage, the three of us:
my top half, my bottom half and you full of oblong gashes.
"Are you OK?" I asked.
"Yeah, I feel fine," you answered, "much better than I usually do."
You unlatched the magician's box I was encased in. My legs stood up on their own, full of nervous energy. I admired their enthusiasm. You helped lift my torso onto my bottom half and I slid precariously atop myself, my partitioned middle a slick portal between lives. I held onto my hips as if my pants were too big. The house lights were turned up, and there was no longer a magician, all the cocktail tables were empty, all the candles blown out. The drum and melody of some song drifted on the other side of the dirty red curtain. I could see forms shifting through the tiny space between them. Were they dancing?
"The Beautiful Jennifer" in her glittered low-cut costume appeared gracefully in mid-air, floated unconscious and prostrate through the opening in the curtain, silver rings circling about her.
"Should we go in?" I asked.
We were vanished to the place where magic keeps its victims: the sequined assistants and the embarrassed volunteers. We sat down at the Tikki bar. You seemed relieved that the hole through your thigh had expelled your wallet. I bought you a drink. The guy next to me kept vomiting white doves onto the bar, they stood, bewildered, then flew through the ceiling and disappeared. The ceiling was more like a sky than a ceiling really, the dark veil of atmosphere over a place where there are too many lights to see stars. When a black haired girl in amazing glass sling-back heels started hitting on you, I got up and stood on the edge of the dancefloor. That's when the short man called Harry all wrapped up in locks and chains asked me to dance. You asked to cut in and whispered in my ear:
"How did you do it?"
To which I revealed the secret to all of my best tricks.
I hung myself on your shoulders as we floated upward, grasped the holes in your body like handles. You cradled my hips so I wouldn't fall apart. My legs wrapped themselves around you.
We found ourselves suspiciously back at our tables in the audience on opposite ends of the room, staring queasy into the thick yellow of our drinks. The ice hadn't even melted. Our dates were smiling, applauding the ruse. We did not look at each other, if we had, we wouldn't have recognized anyway. On our inner stage, surreptitiously printed are the alphabets of a man full of holes and a woman sliced in two.
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