Hati & Katrina

Perhaps this is actually a dream journal. 

I enjoy waking up and writing about my all night long, wildly vivid dreams alongside coffee and slipper feet. 

I find just being horizontal I can remember them- walking into a darker room, or even just tilting my head back and closing my eyes, letting my jaw go slack, they come rushing back like the tide, so much information filling in all the little divots in the sand. Soaking in, always the same, always new.

I go to great lengths to shield my psyche against most of the outside waking world. I decided when I was about 16 years old that I was the type of creature that wanted to be in the world, but not quite of the world, and should limit my exposure to mainstream culture, foods, sounds and environments that would clutter my psyche, and perhaps this is why I have this vast playing ground for nighttime dream worlds to run a muck. The textures and feelings and scenarios are so vivid. 

The histories of my selves and the characters are long and lush and complicated just like in waking life, but I know about them, in my dreams I understand why the people are doing what there doing. I have this inner dialogue with myself about it, and seem to respond to the situations with more empathy and grace.  

I am in Orlando Florida,  last night in the all-white hotel bed I, my hair stained the pillow case pink, I passed out after our first night of shows here.

In my dreams I was in a troll land that switched back in forth between being human and troll space. The whole structure of the cities were crumbling, we had to run for our lives, I was crying as I tried to pack my small bag with one costume, I had to leave my roller derby skates behind, they would eventually sink into the water as the flooding was coming fast. 

Cielo was my husband in the dream and he was a human when I was a troll person- we switched back and forth throughout the dream, never in the same place at the same time. 

It was impossible for me to tell when I was what, I seemed to be the only person not able to see my change. It wasn't that the characters looked that different, it was just a magical quality that changed there energy in this way, that you could "see" them, and the humans had harder edges to them, seemed "bigger", held space more like cut out paper dolls rather that closer to the earth and mossy vine-y, soil like energy... that the trolls had

As I walked up this one stairwell it crumbled around me. It was tight and spiraled up like the staircase in my old flat in the south of France. I was naked and was apologizing over and over about it. On the rooftop were other troll like people who ran and jumped off the rooftops and down into moving trucks and the undulating sidewalks . 

 I tried to collect my little sister who was little like a doll, my bag, my lover, in the end I lost everything. I was floating in the water, hanging on to a wrought iron rail on someones  stoop of their back door that was floating down the flooded city. I was hiding from the humans. Cielo was to remain human and me a troll. 

There was a dark beach and us refuge troll strangers walked down it, wet and devastatingly empty, watching the paper doll humans erect hard cornered paper-architecture where our magical spaces had once been, before all the crumbling and cold water flooding.

on the ship

I had these epic dreams...

I was on this huge ship that was moving through thick contaminated water. At the end I helped the men bring up the anchor, I had to squeeze though this terribly small space to get to the anchor room. Low on the floor, like a crack under a door, I pushed my body though and found myself in the red carpeted room. It was like the Queen Mary rooms, but larger, redder.  All the carpet smelled like boat.

 I was looking for Jenny all over the ship. I made a mermaid tail out of foam core, clear packing tape,  a blond wig. I was swimming in my tail through the water. I had a dance partner mermaid. She asked why I looked so much like a man. I was more of a merman. I caught myself in the mirror and I saw a stranger man face I had never worn before. I kept applying make up but I couldn't paint on the face I was used to seeing. 

The whole dream I was terribly sad. I knew she was on the ship. 

It was miles long. 

The last time I saw her we were in a room full of people rolling around on the crazy patterned hotel carpet, rocking with the enormous boat, bodies silently flailing. She didn't seem to see me, she looked like a stranger. It was a carpet party, at one point I asked the librarian DJ if she had any Ladytron. I felt like I was in fifth grade. The bodies all around moving like empty soda cans, I was drenched in loneliness. 

 I wondered about my tail. 

My mother, grandmother and aunt were all in one dark room, talking about my dad. He was going to jail and they all shook there heads knowingly. I kept looking at the alarm clock and trying to figure out the time, the day, where she was. I knew she was on the ship and I couldn't find her. My hair was all wet and I got off at the wrong stop. 

I looked the map and I was going south when the campsite was north. Along the beach I found washed up fabric and tried to make myself a home that would work. I knew she had shifted and I was lost along the beach with strangers. My mom was somewhere crying and I wondered about my sisters and what had happened to them, I knew about Jenny and her stranger face, and mine.

Pack luster

I did in fact turn 27, but I do believe that I am unraveling in a way that feels like I am turning younger. 

I never believed "I knew everything" as a teenager, or child or young adult. I always felt solid in what I knew I knew. And knew that I didn't know so much. 

What I went though and analyzed and regurgitated and processed and touched and painted and had feedback from sane trusted others; that sorta thing I could feel pretty secure with, saying that I "knew about it". 

 I knew what I did not want to be like, long before I knew what kind of person I wanted to become. 

People who are older and much older then me will know I am young. 

Children who look at me will know that I am colorful, pink fun like Bratz Doll and older, a lot older then them. They will think about when they are "grown up" and if they will know anyone like me, be like me, wonder how they might be. 

I think about children and homes and owning cars and having health insurance and payment plans and taking vacations, having a storage space or garage with outdoorsy equipment and holiday decoration boxes labeled and writing books and having big family friend annual get-togethers. 

I think about belonging to a thing that is bigger than me. 

I've always wanted that. 

To be apart of something. I have felt the most satisfied in that department when I was in colleges.

 One summer I spent at Cal Arts on the hot, eucalyptus smelling Valencia campus. It was the first time I had ever felt what that belonging feels like. I was surrounded by fantastic artists, queer kids, seen by them, loved in a way I could feel. I reeled in the company of the brilliant minds all around me. We were the 15 year old out casts of our public schools, but here, all together we could dance, make art, play music, write, act, do stuff we just know how to do more than we knew about anything else. 

 We were all going to grow up and make stuff.

I spent a different summer in another Pre-Collage art program at UCSB College of Creative Studies. A campus that felt generally dull, but the College students who were our dorm leaders or whatever, I loved. I was the "Diversity Leader"  for the Student Activities thingy for the summer, at the time I was an "Ally".  I was a teenage girl who kept falling for gay boys. I had never seen a "butch" or "gender queer" type female person, I didn't know about it. I was attracted to the "queer quality" the boys had, delicate features, boy smelling, eyeliner, chipped nail polish, messy hair, I adored it. 

At MICA, we worked, we all just worked so hard.

Roller derby in Baltimore brought about the most intense feelings. I became apart of this huge, crazy intense family, with a mission- skating. We trained, worked, played together. It was the most intense time.

All my perceptions of sports changed after that. I understood about what it means to sweat, that the body is a machine. What it means to want to cry and vomit and shit you are trying so hard. 

I would ride my bike around, see a roller girl I felt exponentially safer knowing they were sprinkled throughout the sketchy streets of Baltimore. It was a secret all girl gang and everything in my life felt buoyant, easier, lifted by being 1 of the 60 women in the league. 

Life is different when you move in a flock around and around in a circle, with your hair flying and music blasting.

 Life is peaceful with wheels humming around the rink. 

I am a pack animal. I fare better with the whole. 

For never wanting a normal job, I am such a team player. The idea of accomplishing a thing together is so much more exciting to me than to create just my vision. I always talk about this. Things are so much more interesting to me when I am terrified to do a thing that the others all wanna do, and I do it and the shape I thought I lived in changes again, and again I don't know who I am, I un-do what I thought I knew, and I am younger.