some fleshing out, as promised. Mostly fluff.
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I am sitting an inch or two above the rooftop of a parking garage in downtown Shinjuku, starting at a fractal snowflake in off-pink. Or close enough to one for government work. I try to use as little power as possible while doing so, so as not to give away any free hints of my presence.
This is my Zen.
My Zanshin.
My equivalent of crawling into the deepest hole I can find and whimpering in terror.
That, and I'm contemplating a bottle of Baileys. I plan on doing so for the next hour or three, before I make my way back.
I'd like to think that I'm starting to get a hang of this 'having power' thing.
Still, today this serves as mostly a distraction from contemplating some things too much.
I let the individual crystalline petals that make up the 'snowflake' separate, then have them rotate along their axis while slowly circling around me. This while maintaining at least some focus on keeping afloat. It's not getting any easier, and I don't expect it to, as it's more a question of getting my brain used to this kind of multitasking.
That I'm not falling on my ass every other minute ... anymore ... must mean I'm getting the hang of it.
It's not helping much.
I settled down, letting the petals fade away and unscrewing the bottle cap, taking a sip ...
So, I met Kino Makoto today.
That was so weird.
Not quite up there on the strangeness scale with my 'I slept with whom?' moment, or my 'This is not the body I went to sleep in' moment, but somewhere in the top ten.
Definitely right up there with Haruka's shopping patterns, which are now another thing I experienced firsthand.
I know I'm stereotyping, but I expected her to show a mix of the typical male and female 'buying' and 'shopping' moments. Forgetting, for a moment, that it was me who actually needed to get some things. Like a shirt that isn't clawed up into confetti-like consistency.
I did not expect her to smile, nod, then drag me off and have me act as her own personal life-sized, anatomically correct Ken-doll. How many, I have no idea. She took about as much unholy glee in the experience as I did mortification, and I imagine I would have been upset if she wasn't such a firm believer in equal rights.
On that matter, two points.
One, she makes a pair of hot-pants look like a work of art.
Two, no matter how tempting the idea of seeing her modeling a thong is, it's still not enough to get me into a sundress.
Yes, it was that kind of trip.
Which was when we came back to the apartment complex, bags in tow, and myself no longer looking like a reject from a grunge association, to find someone moving into the apartment on the other side of the hall.
Then that someone introduced herself, and seeing as I _had_ seen her on the news, wearing a ridiculously short skirt and throwing around lightning like it was going out of style, I found myself remarking on how the universe has a sense of humor more twisted than mine.
Because that wasn't apparent already when I woke up in bed with a Sephiroth clone, wearing a Zoisite suit, or engaged in a song and dance number with the once and future Senshi of Uranus. Not to mention waking up next to her on the morning after, or what followed.
I screw the cap back on, after miraculously leaving most of the bottle's contents intact, then get up.
Evening is coming around.
On the other hand, this isn't the worst situation I can imagine myself in. Living with Haruka is anything but boring, and having the girl who moonlights as Sailor Jupiter moving in across the hall isn't necessarily a delayed death sentence.
If I tell myself that last part often enough, I may even believe it.
On the plus side, she did bring good coffee. That just about makes up for any future bouts of attempted homicide right there.
I coast back towards 'home' on, metaphorically speaking, a cloud of unfounded self-delusion and optimism.
Factually, I take the subway and walk a bit, but that sounds nowhere near as dramatically appropriate, so I'm going with the former.
C'est la Vie.
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