cat tamer
Contrary to popular believes, getting rid of old habits doesn’t have the same ring as a reptile shedding its grained out sand skin. It’s more like I had to shoot the older version of myself. Not only shoot but loop that redundancy back and forward in my own head until I finally realize the moment a supposition meets honesty. A cat has nine lives and I’d like to think that must mean that cats have ever so lesser fucks to give as each time a version of themself dies. I think I can physically feel a version of myself dying.
Death and soulmates are almost similar in an uncanny way. We create these lives even though billion years before it all, we were dead. That’s also how native we bear ourselves to be before meeting a person truly important to us. Life in this timeline isn’t co-existent and it never will be which is why when individuals willingly chooses to include another in their lives it becomes an outrageous fortune.
I think even death has a heart and I met my heart each time as I was in the process of killing another one of myself. A cat tamer I suppose. Love, in its rawest form, is not unlike death. It demands a sacrifice, not of the body but of the ego. To truly love another is to be reborn in their gaze, stripped of presumptions, bare and vulnerable. Yet, there is freedom in this au naturel, an exhilarating release that comes from being known and still being cherished. The cat tamer doesn’t just witness the falls; you cherish the grace and resilience of the landing.
After all, you have eyes that always seems large enough to fit me inside. I think I like seeing my reflection inside of another person’s eyes. Most of the time, I fail to see my own reflections: a dream recently showed me a window from a restaurant where a snowman and a street lamp stared in the middle of a downpour. I remember I chased that view until I reached a lake between the snow peaks and as I gazed in nearby trees and the surrounding mountains were reflected so perfectly on the glassy surface that it was difficult to tell where the land ended and the water began. There were countless stars, lambs as well as the silence of the entire canyon but just not myself.
The WIFI title to my current apartment is called “stratosphere” and when my parents visited recently, they had asked for connection. My father shocked me when he helped out my mom on the pronunciation of the word, “The first part is our daughter and the second part is p-h-e-r-e.” It took me a second to realize that my father actually knew what stratos meant to me. “Dad how do you know what stratos is?” To which my father responded without looking up from squinting at my mom’s phone screen, “that’s your pen name, of course I would know.” Lately, I dream and dream of being of what it is to stay consistently alive. I think that desire sprang from spending a month off the radar from everything that I concerned and over-concerned myself with. (Yes, this is my way of saying I went on vacation.) “Lucy you are a cat” my friend characterized me after I complained about having a few friends who aren’t even in my city all the while being bothered by other’s pressing too much. So please kill me over it. c'est la fucking vie.
I had a Manhattan in a jazz bar on the road between Soho to Noho the other day. In the realm of commerce, there’s a beguiling blend of old-world charm and new-world depression for its place of residence; a statement, testament pulses the city that stands paralleled for me: bicoastal. Theatrically speaking, you leave, and with you, something quiet goes. Absence lingers, an aristocratic city with my poetic undertones. That’s all for today folks. As always, have a good day.
-stratos
