The Stories We Wish Were True

Listen.

There are consequences to the unconscious repetition of stories.  Regurgitated narratives harden into what we think is true.  This is the disease of seriousness.  It reproduces history we have already learned from.  Dreams and artistic manifestation require the integrity that is built on a foundation of innovation and trust.  How do we grow these?  We tell new stories.  We resurrect mythology.

Remember that joy and sacrifice are paramount to heroism.  Healing from a history of narcissism, war, trauma, and consumerism can be playful.  Maybe it has to be. 

Bringing wonder to conflict helps sustainably restructure harmful patterns.  Imagination transforms problems into gorgeous complexities.

Listen. 

There are fairy tales wound through the magnificence of our anatomy.  Listen to them.   Celebrate the sensual experience with presence and curiosity.  Eat good food.  Smell the air.  Say thank you to everything.  This builds strength, encourages the intrinsic ability to heal.  This is how we grow ourselves, how we unlock our superhero abilities. 

In doing so, the world around us transforms into the world we dream.  The stories we wish were true become our reality.

Listen.

Healing and learning are the same thing.  Play is medicine.  Storytelling is curriculum.

I don't mind pain I can taste.

It took a jump from a pull up bar to swell my knee.  It took a naked, post howl scramble down an Icelandic church hill to break my toe.  Took drunken Christmas meal mandolin preparation to slice my finger, a lollypop craving to put me in front of the car, an accidental surrender to bruise my heart, rehearsal on an aerial pirate ship to crunch my fourth metatarsal…

The sun is generous on my back.  The breeze is soft.  Dogs barking, the toot of a car locking, the elastic sweep sweep of springtime birds. A chain jingles. 

I smell the lavender and coconut oil I rubbed on my body.  I smell the taste in my mouth.  Bread and eggs with spinach.  A friend made it for me. 

The whispers of the outside world do not trouble me.  Not these.  It's the invisible ones I fear.  The thoughts I cannot taste or smell.

My shoes are beautiful resting on this leopard print picnic sheet.  A list forms in my mind and upsets my belly.  Children yell and run in circles.  This body is tired.  I've been beating it my entire life.  Pain is so reliable.  I don't mind pain I can taste.

It's the escape from it.  The shadow spells that conjure tension and invoke imaginary cages.  This is the sensation I run away from.  The sensation of running away.  The antisensation. The terrifying suggestion of future pain.

I need to buy toilet paper.  I need to water my plants.  To grab laundry from the car, get an MA, buy eggs, find a lover, get pregnant, climb a tree, stretch, wash my hair, make money.  The children are in a line.  Their heads are down and they hold hands.  Each has a partner.  One is wearing a red skirt. 

The ice-cream truck drives by.  In spring there are lots of ice-cream trucks.  They tink tank on my tequila brain, but I don't mind the inspired irritation.  I can hear it.  I'm happy it's real.

Anti-aging

It started with that thing Dan said to me.  He speaks at high volume with his face too close to mine, mostly talking (very quickly) about the famous people he met back in the day.

"Don't get older," he says often, "It sucks.  Hold onto the good years while you can."

When Dan makes a joke I usually feel uncomfortable.  Not because it's lewd or inappropriate.  Because they are not funny and he always stares at me for a long time afterward, waiting with a creepy grin that seems to get closer to me the longer it takes for me to rally a smile.  He smells like Listerine. 

Two days ago Dan asked me if anyone hit on me recently.  His awkward gesture of conversation was not out of character.

"Well, not really, but a man in the park said I was beautiful."

"Looks like you've still got it," said Dan.

The comment landed with a thunk.  Still got it? 

He waited, grinning, getting closer. 

Have I reached a point in life now where I could soon lose it?  Woah.  I'm already 29 years old.

The Listerine smell became stronger.  I made the face kids make when asked to smile for a camera - more like a fear grimace - teeth bared, eyes squinty.

I'm afraid of getting older.

***

Later, while waiting in line at the Whole Foods Market, I watched a young boy drive his left thumb in front of his face, turning it into a space ship with accompanying sound effects.  It became obvious that he had been separated from his guardian.  There were no grown-ups checking on him.  He stood in front of the check-out, beneath the friendly robot directing patrons to their respective registers, looking out at the ordered cluster.

I walked over and asked him if he was with someone. 

"Yes, I am here with my dad."

"Where is he?"

"He is in there."  He pointed with his thumb, gesturing at the mess of people.

I shrank myself to his size and saw only legs and purses. 
"What's his name?"

"Um, his name is Murray.  And my mom's name is Cheryl."

At this point the crowd was beginning to spoil.  It is upsetting to have a woman and a little boy blocking the path to the registers with slow talk like this.  "Let's go find him," I suggested.  "Do you want to hold my hand?"

I felt his tiny palm against my own and we walked to customer service.

I asked him how old he was.  He said five. 

"Five," I echoed, bright-eyed and over zealous.  "Wow."

"Yes!  And I'm also three!" he jumped when he said it. 

When I heard this it threw me into days of contemplation.

I'm twenty-nine.  And I'm fifteen.  And I'm five.   And I'm also three.

***

I was walking around Washington Square Park just after sunset.  A large tree caught my attention.  There was a woman standing at the base of it feeding squirrels.  She pulled peanuts out of a bag and the arboreal rodents snatched them from her hands.  There were so many it looked like ants swarming a piece of candy.  I asked her if I could feed them too. 

"No, it's very dangerous unless you know what you're doing." 

"Okay," I said, but I was visibly disappointed.  I didn't want her to feel bad for saying no, so I continued conversation.  "It's an amazing tree."

"Yes.  It's the oldest tree in Manhattan," she said.  "A historic tree."  Or maybe she said, "An historic tree."

I thought about trees.  Trees acquire rings.  But they don't lose them.  A six-hundred year old tree has six hundred rings.  And it also has three.

***

I was at the senior citizens center for the puppet class.  Adriana, who hugs me with the wisdom of great ships, whose wrinkles whisper fairytales, whose grandmother voice could warm the stiffness out of one of Dan's jokes, was showing me her creation.

"Me llamo Juan," she announced moving the puppet's hand and speaking in a demure baritone.  "Tengo 75 años."  

"Como yo," Adriana responded, in her own voice.

"Si, tengo 75 años como tú," said puppet Juan.  I have 75 years...

***

I've still got it.  You're right Dan.  I always will.  Maybe I don't have to hold on to anything.   Even when I'm 75 I will have them - the rings of 3 and 16 and 29…  But I'm still a little afraid. 

I Devised Snake Puppets (among other things)

This is the last entry of a month long blogathon.

I am tired. 

I ate pork belly and kale and brussels sprouts.  The wine was sour.

I gave a massage.  A damn good one.

I slept in.  I devised snake puppets.  I thought about always thinking about myself.  I became embarrassed, but only by the part of myself that judges the part that gets embarrassed. 

I took a shower.  I used the body scrub I made from salt and grapeseed oil and the smell of grapefruits.

I had three orgasms while doing aerial conditioning, leg lifting with crossed eyes and shaking knees.  Nobody around me knew I was coming.

I rode my bike down the sidewalk thinking, "You will die, you will die, and you will die, I will die," and so on. 

I sang to my breakfast.

I complimented the waitress on her lovely back.  She hugged me.  She smelled like mushrooms and marijuana.  I liked that.

I would guess at this:

The longing we have to be heard is actually a longing to listen.  The devices we use to mediate life, the cloud forums, platforms in which we perform ourselves are oversimplified reflections.  Words (like these) are removed from the medicine of connection.  We cannot prove experience because we are experience.  All we can do is lean back into the flavor or our being and taste ourselves.

The Query

To Whom It May Concern,

I write.  I love to write.  I also love to live.  I soak up the peculiarities of life, pull them in through my pores, my mouth, my delicate parts.  I fill up with the delicious funk of the underground, then spread it onto the page so I can look at it again, word-sculpt the experience, offering the reflection up to the weirdness from whence it came.

I am a storyteller.  My material is inspired by dreams, travel, people I meet and the multifarious jobs I have the privilege of working.  My resume is an amalgamation of teaching, care-giving, and healer occupations combined with various black market gigs.

I have served coffee, taught preschool, written ethnography and taken care of people living with multiple sclerosis.  I have been a massage therapist, a dominatrix, a circus acrobat, a grass delivery girl.  I have worked at an underground poker club, modeled, nannied, written children's stories, and organized music festivals.  For a while I was teaching yoga and infant massage at a water birthing clinic in Peru.  This morning I went to the senior citizen's center down the road and helped them make puppets.  

The list continues.  Most of the jobs have found me.  For whatever lovely reason, these ventures continue to present themselves fluidly and with graceful timing.  I have never been destitute, seeking to make money with the immediacy of fiscal desperation.  Rather, I am perpetually curious and "yes" has treated me well over the years.

I would like to write for you.  There are gorgeous stories that come from deep inside this country.  They are engaging, important and have the capacity to generate understanding and compassion. As a writer, a dancer, a pseudo-academic with an attraction to the cultural nuances of birth, death and sex, a non-threatening woman, able to connect with varied social groups, I am lucky enough to play in and reflect upon taboo spaces in this world. 

This is not a request to wax nostalgic on imagined better times, nor is it a memoir describing exciting lives I've lived.  This is the life I continue to live.  Mine is richly colored because I am part of communities that are marginalized through the social boundaries that dictate, not only legal from criminal, but fringe from mainstream, creative from hegemonic, ugly from beautiful. 

I would like to write for you.  There are stories that come from deep inside me.  I would like to share them.

Thank you for your time.

Sincerely,
Katrina Lys Pratt

I'm silly for even considering he might be into me.

My heart beats faster when I talk to him.  I don't know.  I feel the humility of high school in his presence.  I want to say I'm better.  I want to be more than I am.  I spend extra time thinking about what I'm going to wear.  I get all nervous when I'm standing next to him.  And I think to myself, "I'm silly for even considering he might be into me."

What is the mechanism that protects hearts?  What is the part of me that craves his warmth?  His body next to mine at night.

I fantasize about it.  That sweet opportunity to cuddle up together and keep each other. 

I stumble into fresh insecurities with the interaction.  They bring me closer to something like a feeling of not being good enough, which might be the same as wanting to be better.

What does better look like?  Well, as much as I would like to stretch my beauty around someone and seduce him with intoxicating visuals, self improvement does not hinge on the tenuous nature of my physical condition.

When I'm honest and I think of "better,"  things become more clear.  I cannot pretend to be confused about what I would like to do.  Instead, I medicate my way away from knowing how to grow or I suck it up, brave the terrifying excitement of discipline.

***

Being born is cold.  Icy air stinging at the face and raw body, accustomed to a wholly different state of matter. 

We think about birth as a passive process, something magically linear, dependent upon the mother's body alone.  There are two people existing in one.   The mother, while in many cases relieved at no longer having to incubate another, might not be the only one pushing.  The baby is as active a participant in birth as its host.  If this is understood to be true, all of us at one time - even though we don't remember it - had to respond to some highly intelligent call to action. 

What kind of courage is it that might inspire breathing air after an existence of aquatic inhalation?  Can you imagine the kind of trust required to go into the water and begin breathing?  It is as much a death as a birth, an irrefutable trust in the world.  A recognition that you are part of it.

***

When I fantasize about what I could be - or do, I see it requires a great deal of change.  It is necessary to find that courage and trust, go in and practice being terrifically terrified. 

If it's hard to know what direction that might be, if the voices in your head are yelling all kinds of contradictory advice and there is an undeniable and confusing pull toward expansion, try thinking of this…

1.  Say you met someone that made your heart beat faster, that reminded you of high school humility, you spoke loud and awkwardly in his or her presence, laughing during uncomfortable pauses, thinking all the while, "I'm silly for even considering he might be into me."  If you could be your most beautiful self, how would that be? 

2.  What is the most beautiful compliment you can imagine receiving?  What could someone say to you that would touch you so deeply your body could not hold it in?  You would have to let it become real?  What is it that someone sees in you? 

Follow that.