Freedom, justice and equality lost a major battle yesterday. The Island is in mourning today. In case you haven't heard, the legislature of the state of Maine passed a law this spring giving same-sex partners the right to marry. By referendum, the voters of Maine yesterday repealed that law. The legislature might be able to restore the law in the next session, but for now Maine and the entire country have taken a major step backwards from marriage equality for same-sex couples.

We keep winning in courts and legislatures. In those arenas, for all their flaws, we have legal arguments that transcend fear and hate and prejudice. We have most of the weapons of the law and democracy on our side: fairness, equality, justice, freedom, and the rule of equal rights under the law. It's not just an issue of "gay rights." It's an issue of equal civil rights under the law. We're starting to win those rights in courts and legislatures, over and over. But when we go before the people for a vote, the weapons arrayed against us are ignorance and hate and fear. Even in America freedom falls victim to fear. We may have lost another battle, but we'll keep fighting. We have to keep fighting for this cause, and eventually we'll win. Freedom, justice and equality are on our side.

Rachel and Evie and I were in Maine recently, hanging out and traveling around and visiting friends. Everyone seemed to be talking about this issue, and everyone we knew and met there was sure we would win this battle. Everyone we talked to said it would be close, but of course we would win! Maine, they told us, has a proud tradition of defending civil rights, of loving liberty, of live and let live. But then, we were in Portland, Maine's very cool little big city, and the cosmopolitan and well-traveled little resort towns up and down the coast. Up in the backwoods of Maine, our friends in Portland told us today, it's still another century. They're not sure which century exactly, but yesterday those people in the backwoods proved they're not quite living in the twenty-first century yet. The people who voted to repeal Maine's marriage equality law may be good people who meant well (let's give them the benefit of the doubt here), but they're living in the past. They're living in fear. They're the real losers here, not us. We're going to win this struggle sooner or later, and everyone knows it. Even the people living in fear. That's what they're so afraid of.

The rest of us will continue to love the people we love and build happy and productive lives with them, whether we have "legal" marriages and marriage equality or not. We're living our lives in love, and passion, and hope. Is that better than living in fear? Yeah, we think so too.

Caitie

This is Caitie, Rachel and Evie, officially signing on to insulanova , the New Island blog. We're also going to try to get kissmecaitlin back on the air, from the Castle at the eastern end of the Island. No broadcast schedule yet, but soon.

We're back on the ground now, the three of us, but our heads are still in the air. We're finally home from Portugal, Vermont, Maine and Alaska. We flew from the eastern slope of the Rockies to the eastern shore of the Atlantic to the eastern edge of the Pacific and back again. We saw weddings and parties and ponies and moose and shooting stars and the Northern Lights, but the very best sight we saw on this trip was the Island waiting for us at the airport to welcome us home. (Especially you, baby sis.)

No other news bulletins from the Castle tonight, too much news and not enough time to tell any of it. The fires have burned low and we're going to bed! Best wishes to everyone from the Island. We'll start catching up soon. It's good to be home.

Caitie, along with Rachel and Evie, for the Castle

The Island is all good. Fears and concerns have been expressed to me and to Stella at stelladellasera over our prolonged silence on LJ, so I'm here to say all is well and happy with the Island. We have challenges and mysteries and growing pains, but we're strong and healthy as individuals, and couples, and triples, and households. And as a family. But we've been too busy to blog very much, for months now, so thanks for the nudges, everyone. We're good, and we send our love to you too.

Two of us (Lucia and Stella) are traveling on business on the East Coast. Their business trip turned into a surprise (for Stella!) beach break in Cape May, New Jersey, where they're having a great time. They'll be home this Sunday. Two of us (Danny and Josh) have been on the Western Slope on a very cool research project related to Danny's doctoral work. They got home today. Two of us are away at school in their second year of college (Ciara and Kelly), but they're here at Island West with us for the weekend. Those of us who aren't in school full-time are working full-time. Two of us (Ronnie and Annie) are hard at work on a major new theatrical production, and my Evie and I are working full-time for our Rachel on a big project that we think will help turn our company around. Nine of us will be at the airport Sunday to welcome Lucia and Stella home, and that makes eleven, and that's the entire Island.

Except for one. This fall or winter the Island will officially become twelve. (Right now we're calling ourselves eleven-and-a-half.) The woman who will be our twelfth member (Zizi) is in Paris right now, traveling with our friends Maria and Michelangelo. Some of what they're doing in France I can't talk about yet, but they're also visiting Zizi's grandmother and searching for what's left of her family. We have some challenges in bringing Zizi aboard, but we'll get it done, with a little help from our friends. We haven't had a failure yet, and we're not starting now. Evie and Rachel and I just celebrated our first anniversary as a committed triple, this very month. Lucia and Stella will celebrate their third anniversary as a couple next month. Ronnie and Annie have celebrated more anniversaries together than all the rest of us put together. (Just barely.) In the past year and a little more, we've opened up the Island to Danny and Josh, and to Evie, and to Ciara and Kelly, and now to Zizi. We rebuilt the Island and the Island keeps changing, and with every change the New Island becomes stronger. We have more anniversaries right around the corner, and many more to come.

Next spring the Island will turn three years old as a family. At almost twelve members now, maybe we should start thinking of ourselves as a tribe, or a commune, or a cult--personally I think we're turning into a movement. But family is the word that means the most to us, and family is what we call ourselves. And a family is what we are.

Thanks for being concerned about us. We're doing all right. We hope you are too. This cool dark starry night in September, I'm sending all of you our love and our best wishes, from the Island.

Caitie

We're home from the mountains, we're all back together, and the night is windy and warm under dark summer skies. Everyone is here, everyone is happy, my little world is complete this night. There are rough seas around the world, but tonight this is an Island of peace and happiness. May your world be as happy as mine, wherever you may be.

Love and luck and dark skies full of falling stars, from the Island.
 

Caitie

We call it the Inferno. We enter it through the Ninth Circle, the lowest circle ringing the deepest pit of Hell, but it is not Hell. It is a gateway to Heaven. One of the darker and scarier gateways to Heaven, but if it led us down into Hell we wouldn’t be going there this weekend. The Island’s path leads up from the Ninth Circle, not down. Never down. We ascend from the Ninth through the upper circles of the Inferno, out of the lower darkness into the gloom of the Purgatorio, into the light of the Paradiso, and finally to La Vita Nuova, the New Life: Owner and slave sharing one life, indivisible.

The Island named and structured our slave training system after Dante’s Divine Comedy, and Dante is probably still spinning in his tomb. But it can be divine and it can be comedic, and it is a guided journey from darkness into light, and from torment into bliss. We think it fits and Dante will get over it.

In the Island’s Ninth Circle slaves and slaves-in-training learn this lesson: You live to serve your Owner and the Island. Give them everything you have to give—and you can trust them with your life.

We’re up in the mountains at our cabin this weekend and all next week, all twelve of us. We’ll be spending most of this week in the Inferno and the Purgatorio, by popular demand and official Island decree. Five of us will wind in the other seven, using the same red silks we used last summer for Danny and Josh, who will also be making a startling transition this weekend. Above the whip to begin this journey: Lucia, Rachel, Veronica, Daniel, and me, Caitlin. We are the guides and guardian angels for these seven doomed (and beloved) travelers beneath us.

Beneath the whip: Stella, Eva, Anna, Joshua, Zizi, Kelly, and my sister Ciara. Some are slaves for life, some are free, some might be slaves in the future. Some have been through the Ninth Circle before, some are on their first journey through the Inferno. Some will probably spend the entire week deep in the Inferno, some will be promoted unexpectedly up into the Purgatorio and be pressed into the Island’s service above the whip. No one knows yet which one of these seven will go the distance in the Ninth Circle.

But someone will.      

Caitie

There are baby tigers here on the Island tonight. Baby tigers burning bright, in the forests of the night, and our ultimate and original baby tigers are Kelly and my baby sister Ciara and my Evie. Ciara and Kelly are here with us on the Island tonight till morning, to help fill our tiger cage with hot wet loud crazy tiger sex. We have a few other tigers here for them to play with. The tigers were roaring up in the mountains last weekend too, but we don't have a proper tiger cage at the cabin, not yet, and the growling was making the ponies nervous. So the serious tag team tiger cage match was held over for tonight. I hope my sis and I don't have to try to explain massive claw lacerations or missing limbs to our mom at lunch tomorrow. Tigers play rough.

Baby tigers will enter the cage in two teams of two. The cage locks behind them. (Don't worry, a guardian angel is standing by: Me.) Two teams of tigers are being pounded and pawed and pumped into tiger heat right now by their trainers (Lucia, Rachel, Ronnie and Danny). Cage-ready tigers are being painted in their team tiger stripes with lickable tiger-safe colors. Orange and black tonight for Ciara and Kelly, white and black for Stella and Zizi. Tigers score points by controlling the cage, by ripping forced orgasms from the other team by tooth and claw, by being the best and fiercest and sexiest baby tigers they can be. Girls, get your tiger on.

Our tigerplay match rules have evolved a little since the first time, in Miami this spring, but our very first cageful of baby tigers in a real tiger cage on South Beach will never be equaled, or forgotten. Cage rules tonight are: No human words allowed, only tiger language, points for volume and vocabulary, tigers must be on all fours at all times except for climbing, leaping and pouncing, tooth claw tongue and paw are fair, sex toys and tools are outlawed (but pretty likely to materialize in the cage as if by magic), tag-teaming is fair, pinning holding humping grinding and licking are fair, biting is fair but drawing blood is a foul, tigers are on their honor to cum fair and count fair, continuous connected multiple orgasms count as one but earn extra points for duration and loudness. No faking, no safewording, no tapouts, no timeouts, guardian angels on duty at all times, play period is 44 minutes or one tiger surrenders or the guardian angel blows the whistle. Spectators are discouraged from risking their fingers or toes or other valuable extremities between the bars. Judges' scoring decisions are final. Extra points will be awarded for style, grace, fierceness, command of the cage, and tigerosity.

The winning tiger team will face the reigning champions, me (Caitie) and my purrfect prizewinning baby tiger Evie, wearing our team stripes of red and gold, in a title match at a later date to be determined (soon, probably this weekend). Tonight's winning baby tigers (and the losers too) will be celebrated and sprayed with champagne and licked and fucked in the hot tub in what's left of their team stripes.

And loved forever. 

Caitie

Stormy weather on the night of the new moon. It’s very dark here tonight, dark within and without. The radio said “storms clearing after midnight,” but there are storms in this house tonight that might not clear so easily.

It is possible, and I know this well, to want with all your heart two things that cannot both happen at the same time in the same universe. I’m lucky--and I know this well too. I have the things I want most in the world, and they co-exist very happily at the same time in the same world. And they love each other. Did I mention how lucky I am?

Some of us are lucky and yet not so lucky. Zizi is finding out exactly how lucky she is. She’s in love with too many people and she wants too many different lives. This is partly the Island’s fault. She’s fallen in love with two different families. She’s seen two lives she knows she can love, and it seems she can have only one. But only a few months ago it seemed for a while she couldn’t have either one, and her life might have been, in a certain way, over. She’s very lucky, and she knows this, and yet not quite lucky enough.

She can’t choose between them and us and no one wants to make her choose. She couldn’t choose anyway, she’s a slave and not made for making choices, so choices will have to be made for her. She knows that, and she accepts that. She couldn’t possibly decide this for herself, not yet. But it’s the pain of wanting two things that can’t both happen and knowing you can only have one that’s been creating the storm inside here tonight.

The eye of the storm has dried her eyes (with a little help) and been taken to bed by Lucia and Stella. Zizi doesn’t know yet that later tonight, by the dark of the moon, Evie and I will be slipping in to their bedroom to spirit her away to our bed with Rachel. Or that Ronnie and Annie will steal her away from us sometime after that. Or that by dawn’s early light she’ll probably be waking up to find herself with Danny and Joshie. Only Ciara and Kelly are missing out on all this midnight creeping tonight. (Sorry, babies, we'll make it up to you.) And all of this dashing dark of the moon bed swapping is just designed to dry the tears of one sweet little slavegirl we didn’t expect to love as much as we do and give her (and us) a happier night than she expected to have this stormy night.

But every tear we dry for her she will shed again when she has to leave us. Soon. And she will not be alone.

Caitie

Tonight is the dark of the moon, the new moon, the day we walked on the moon, forty years ago today. Long before I ever saw the moon. I won’t see the moon tonight either, except in my dreams. Thunderstorms here tonight to welcome us down from the mountain, thunder and rain, tornadoes and hail. Parts of the city tonight are powerless in the dark, without even a sliver of moonlight. Not us, though I’m writing this by candlelight. As my dad likes to say, “How the hell can I curse the darkness if you’re gonna keep lighting candles?”

The storms even blew us right out of the pool tonight and that’s not easy to do. After a weekend at the cabin we really missed the pool. The Island is tucked in safely out of the storms, here at our house, at the east end of the Island. Minus two: Kelly and my sis Ciara had to go “home” to the folks. Ciara told me this weekend the Island is their real home now, and not many words have ever made me happier. And plus one: Our guest Zizi is tucked in bed with Lucia and Stell tonight. She can’t sleep in a bed by herself, there are nightmares waiting there for her when she’s alone. She will have no more nightmares if the Island can help it. And we can, and will.

Stella and I were planning on closing our two blogs this week and opening up a new blog for the entire Island. We had the whole Island’s go-ahead. That boat hit a reef last week. We’re trying to refloat that boat, or another one that looks something like it, but we’re belaying that voyage for the moment. We have plenty of things to do, getting the houses at Island West remade and remodeled, getting Zizi remade and remodeled, getting the Island remade and remodeled. Some of those renovations go right down to the foundations, some are just makeovers, some are both. Later on all of that.

Blog hiatus is off as of tonight. New blog rules, as Stella posted, and they come straight from the top, from Lucia. As the Whip for the Island I will enforce these rules vigilantly, and as one of the prime offenders/victims of the ongoing blogging crisis, I might have to crack the whip on myself. Those rules might change, but for now they are The Rules: Emergency measures to keep our two mooncalf blogs on life support until some further decisions can be made about their future. Stella in her post tonight offered a good version of the new rules. Here’s another:

    Start now. Keep it short. Say whatever you want. Stop trying to make sense.
    Don’t explain everything. Start in the middle. And start NOW.

I’ve made far too much sense already, and yet little enough in the grand scheme of things, so I think I’m within the spirit of the rules for tonight. At least I made a start, and how soon is NOW anyway? Time to blow out this candle, check on my happy sleeping Island, and go back to bed with Rachel and Evie. And watch for the new moon in my dreams.

Caitie

We're off on a magical mystery tour to Wonderland.

Happy Fourth of July! Make some noise and light up the night! We'll be back soon from Wonderland, but this blog is finally officially on hiatus until further notice and not simply sleeping. No sleeping tonight on the Island, Wonderland is waiting for us. Make some noise out there, it's almost the Fourth of July!

Caitie, chief whip, for the Island

Dateline the Island

The Island is now officially on spring break. The sun is high, the seas are calm, and the harbor is now closed. Islanders and prospective members under consideration will assemble at five p.m. at the Center of the Island for the induction ceremony. Immediately following, the beach and pool and bar will be open! Islanders new and old and special guests only, by order of the Queen. Proof of Insula Nova citizenship required at all border crossings. The secret password is eleven. News bulletins to follow unpredictably.

Fair winds and blue skies to all the ships at sea, from your friends on the Island.

Caitie, Chief Whip of the Island

The Island is on moon watch tonight. It’s a full moon tonight but it’s raining here, cold rain and clouds blotting out the moon. We’re snuggled up by the fire, watching movies and drinking wine and laughing at each other and being as snug as bugs in a rug, as my mother would say, though my mother would be a little shocked to discover these bugs are happily having sex while snug in the rug. But now and then, when the clouds part like rags and the moon shines through for a moment through the tall windows along the south wall of the dining room, we all shout moon and run to press our moon-starved faces against the windows. We lap up spilled moonlight like thirsty cats lapping up the milk of the moon. And then it’s gone.

The Island’s blogs, Stella’s at stelladellasera  and this one, seem to be on moon watch too. Stell and I have both noted this puzzling phenomenon this year. We seem to be on sort of a sloppy lunar schedule. We bleed out some of our blog blood here once a month, somewhere around the full moon, we write about the moon or we write by moonlight, and then we disappear again—for a month. Very menstrual. Very female. Very loony. Stella and I and the rest of us are trying to find a solution to the lunar blogging crisis here that doesn’t involve strangling both blogs in their sleep. They’ve both been asleep a lot lately, so smothering them in their sleep would be easy enough to do. But we’d miss them. Maybe a lunar month is just the right frequency for us. Maybe in a month we’ll figure it out.

We’re all here tonight at the big house, sometimes we call it Island East or the Castle, the house Rachel and Evie and I share and where the rest of the Island is always at home too. Both houses are homes for all of us, and we hope to have a third house soon, and that will be another home for all of us. Wherever one of us has a roof to shed the rain, all of us have a home. That’s one of our laws on the Island.

The Island is changing. Growing. Maturing. Getting bigger and better and younger and older. Getting more connected and more far-flung. Getting more stable and getting loonier. We’ve evolved and survived. We’ve even thrived. All eleven of us are here tonight, though we are not officially eleven yet. We are eleven in all but the final vote and the final acceptance and the final ceremony. At our brief Star Chamber here tonight, Lucia, our Queen, told us she wanted to see eleven votes. She warned us two of those votes would not officially be counted yet, but she wanted us to see what it felt like to take a ballot of the Island and count eleven votes. It felt wonderful. We all cheered. Lucia counted those two votes anyway: It was unanimous. All the votes have been counted and this is the Island now: Lucia, Stella, Ronnie, Annie, Danny, Josh, Rachel, Caitie, Eva, Ciara, Kelly. We have one member emeritus, and posthumous: Elise. And we have a ghost at the other house named Peggy. They don’t get to vote, but they do express their opinions sometimes.

This is to formally announce that the Island will officially grow to eleven on May 29th, 2009, in a secret and most solemn Island ceremony which will involve the baptism and rebirth of our new members in the holy waters of the Well of the World’s End. In other words, we’re going to throw the New Girls in the pool and jump in after them. And then baptize them with champagne. Swimsuits optional. In other words, no swimsuits allowed.

All right, there’s a little more to it than just jumping in the pool! This will be a very serious ceremony! The jumping in the pool part is important, the spraying the champagne part is critical, but there are also the parts about the blood and the oaths and the kisses and the rings and the swearing allegiance to the Island and its Constitution and the pledging to each other of our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor. Then the pool and the champagne. And the love. The love is the most important part.

Back to the Island moon watch. Practically the only other thing Stella and I seem to have been writing about for months now is birthdays. Birthdays and the moon. Here we go again: Tonight is the full moon and Sunday is my birthday. The party is tomorrow. I’m twenty-eight. Happy birthday to me! I’ve never been this happy before, but I’m starting to get used to it.

Moon! Earlier tonight we were watching Hobson’s Choice. When we got to that amazing scene with a very drunken Charles Laughton playing peekaboo with the full moon in a rain puddle, we all squealed and shouted moon! Stella wasn’t paying any attention, she’s writing something too (it’s that time of the month), and when we shouted moon she jumped up and ran to the window, but the moon wasn’t there—and we all laughed, Stella included. When she sat back down by the fire between me and Lucia she said, Nice try fooling me, you lunatics, but the moon isn’t out there tonight, the moon is right here. This is the moon.

She was right. Stella is always right, aren’t you, Stell? The moon and the whole world and everything I love are all right here by the fire tonight. On the Island.
 
Caitie
 

Yay Iowa too! But Vermont did it the hard way. Vermont got it through both houses of the state legislature and overrode the governor's veto. The Island has a Vermont connection, so maybe we did it. Maybe we helped a little bit. Maybe it was the Island psychically channeling our love and hope and psychosexual enlightenment to Vermont, in exchange for giving us the most beautiful girl Vermont ever grew. Or maybe it was the power of one perfect little girl who still believes cows can jump over the moon. Well, if Vermont can legalize gay marriage, maybe cows really can jump over the moon.

Watch the moon tonight, because Vermont did it. Yay Vermont!

Caitie and Rachel and Eva

The moon is full of milk. Ice-cold milk. In the winter the milk in the moon freezes into vanilla ice cream. Milk and ice cream: That’s why the moon is so white and bright in the night sky. The moon slowly fills up with milk every month, from crescent moon to full moon. Then the full moon pours out all its milk until it’s just a crescent again. When the milk is all gone, the moon disappears until it’s once again time to fill up with milk. The milk of the moon pours out all over the sky and becomes the Milky Way and all the stars and planets and comets. The stars are really just perfect little drops of ice-old milk (or ice cream), floating on an endless sea of dark brown chocolate. (The sky only looks black because it’s so dark outside at night. If you look down into your mug of hot chocolate in a dark room, with whipped-cream clouds floating on a dark sea, it looks just like the night sky, which just proves the sky is really made of chocolate. Oh and some of the really bright stars are actually marshmallows.)

This all makes perfect sense to me. Eva was telling Rachel and me some of the stories her mother used to tell her when she was a little girl. We were all cuddled up together in the hot tub by the pool, watching the crescent moon skim the Front Range, just like the very edge of a saucer full of milk. I was falling in love with Evie’s mother all over again. She was a great mom, the best mom ever, and Evie says she was always ready to talk to her about anything and try to explain almost anything Evie ever wanted to know, even if it meant going where astronomers fear to tread and only magical cows (and moms) rush in. Like the Milkman in the Moon and the sky being made of chocolate.

“So the moon is like a great big pail of milk way up in the chocolate sky?” Evie asked. She thinks she must have been about six or seven the first time she ever heard her mother explain what was up with the moon. Exactly, said her mother, it’s really big and round and it’s made of glass, like a fishbowl, so you can see all the milk inside it. “How does the milk get into the moon?” From cows, of course, her mother explained, where does milk usually come from? “But how do the cows get their milk way up to the moon?” Um, the Man in the Moon milks all the cows when they jump over the moon. They land on the moon to get milked. And then they jump off again. And they land in the pasture, where the grass is so soft they just bounce! “No they don’t, Mom! Do they?” Of course they do! Everyone knows cows jump over the moon, silly. Hey diddle diddle, the cat and the fiddle, the cow jumped over the moon? You remember that, sweetheart, I taught you that when you were just a baby.

Evie says she was just amazed to learn at a very young age that cows had secret super moon-jumping powers! And cats could fiddle! She grew up living with her mother on her grandparents’ dairy farm in Vermont. She watched the cows every day, lots of cows, but she said she never saw any of them jumping. Galumphing maybe, but not jumping. And they had lots of cats too, and she says she never saw the cats fiddling either. But you never really know what cats are up to when you’re not watching them, so cats fiddling wouldn’t be completely out of the realm of possibility. But cows jumping over the moon?

“Really? Our cows? They really jump way up over the moon?” Evie said she asked her mother, all wide-eyed in wonder. Yes, her mother assured her very seriously, our very own cows. Our very own moon. Cows have always jumped over the moon, baby. That’s why they call it the Mooooooon. “But Mom, I never see our cows jumping! They never ever jump! I think our cows are too fat to jump!” Oh the cows jump over the moon every night when the moon is out, baby, her mother said, you just never see them doing it. “But I want to see them jumping! Why can’t I see the cows jump?” Evie asked plaintively. Because they have to wait until good little girls like you are all asleep in their beds before they start jumping. “But why?!” Because they’re so fat, baby! Our big fat cows have to get a running start to jump over the moon! And they’re afraid you might laugh at them when they start jumping! And then they’ll be too embarrassed to jump.

Here Evie said her mother did a great little impression of a plump old cow trying to jump over the moon, a sort of huffing and puffing and hopping and mooing routine that would soon have one happy little girl giggling herself to sleep every time her mother told her this story before bedtime. But Evie says her mother always told her that the very first time she was told that their very own big fat cows were too embarrassed to let her see them jump, little Evie was just horrified. Oh no! It was all her fault the cows had to jump secretly late at night! She was embarrassing the poor fat cows! They couldn’t help being fat, cows just are! What if the moon ran out of milk because the cows were too shy to jump? Evie would be ruining the moon! As her mother told this story when Evie was bigger, Evie’s eyes went wide as saucers of milk that very first time she realized this, and she blurted out, very worried that she was making cows blush and endangering the moon, “Oh Mom! The moon needs more milk! Please tell them it’s okay to jump! I would never laugh at a jumping cow!”

Evie’s mother must have been laughing a little at her very concerned little girl as she kissed her and tucked her into bed. Rachel and Evie and I were laughing too, and those cows had better just get used to being laughed at, because now we will always laugh at a jumping cow. Especially the really fat ones. Evie says when she got a little older her mom would wake her up late at night sometimes, on nights with a full moon, and they would go out into the big grassy yard by the farmhouse to look at the moon. They would play cows jumping over the moon and they would laugh at the cows and spin around mooing at the moon and yelling at the Milkman in the Moon to get those cows all milked by morning, until they fell down laughing in the grass together. Evie told us they were sure they actually saw the cows jumping over the moon one night, and they always talked about how big and bright the moon was that night when the cows jumped over the moon.

I wish I could talk to Evie’s mother. I want to thank her for so many things. Most of all for how much she loved the little girl who grew up into the big girl I love. I wish she hadn’t died long before I met and fell in love with her girl. She was a single mother in a small town in Vermont, who grew up on a dairy farm and got pregnant by a boy who might have been the first boy she ever had sex with. She was in high school, he was in college somewhere nearby, there are lots of colleges in the area but not right in her town, and Evie has never met him, never seen him, never heard a word from him. Not a phone call, not a letter, not a photograph, not a word. He was never part of her life for one second longer than it took him to plant the seed that began her life, but just for doing that one small good deed, I want to thank him too.

Evie doesn’t even know her father’s name. He probably never even knew she existed. Her mother never told anyone who he was or anything about him, except that he was going to college in another town when they met one summer, and she said he was very handsome and had a great smile. I’ll bet he had blue eyes, like Eva, because her mother had green eyes, like me. She kept him a complete mystery, unlike her very clear and comprehensive explanation for how the moon works. She only said he was gone and wouldn’t be coming back and they didn’t need him, she would raise her baby without him, her little girl was all she needed. Evie thinks her grandparents know who he was, or at least they suspected which boy he was, but they won’t talk about him, except to say that they think he died long ago too, and let the dead rest in peace. She thinks her mother probably met him at her family’s ice cream shop in town where she worked summers when she was a teenager, scooping up ice cream for all the tourists, just like Evie did later, when she was a teenager. And where I might have met Evie and maybe even her mother too, the summer she was fifteen, when my folks and I passed through her little town in Vermont on vacation. But we didn’t stop there for ice cream on our way through town, and Evie and I had to wait for years to meet and fall in love. It’s all right. She was worth waiting for.

Her mother died when Evie was only sixteen. Killed by a drunk driver running a stop sign on an icy road, on her way to pick up Evie at her high school after a game. It breaks my heart that one of the two women I love the most has lost two of the women she loved the most, her mother and her first love Elise. I talk to Elise's ghost quite a lot, Evie and I feel pretty close to Elise these days. We talk to her mother too, we visited her mother’s grave in Vermont and we’ve both talked to her there. But I knew Elise—Lizzie—very well, and I can still hear her voice in my head. I have to imagine Evie’s mom and her voice, from her photographs and diaries and the things she left behind, and from Evie’s stories about her, and I still can’t quite hear her voice. I want to. I want to thank her for having this beautiful daughter and for filling her up with love.

She was barely more than a girl herself when she found herself unexpectedly pregnant with Eva. In her family and her town it was very hard for her to be unmarried and pregnant at sixteen. Her parents were ashamed of her. They were angry and unsupportive. Her old school French-Canadian Catholic dairy farmer father told her to her face that she was a tramp and a slut and a disgrace to her family name and she had shamed the entire family forever, and her mother wasn’t much warmer. (Later they came around a little, and they do love their granddaughter. Who wouldn't love a little girl who worries about keeping the poor shy cows from jumping?) Her hit-and-run boyfriend apparently wanted nothing further to do with her or with being a father, her brothers and sisters were pretty cold and unsympathetic, some of her friends tried to help her but they were going on to college soon, without her. She dropped out of high school to have her baby, and later she had to get her GED so she could go to college. She could have made other choices with that pregnancy that would have simplified her life and made things much easier for her and her family. She was under a lot of pressure to terminate the pregnancy, but she stood up to everyone to have Eva and keep her. She wanted this child with all her heart. She chose to have her baby and keep her and raise her and love her. She did the right thing. I want to thank her for that.

She eventually finished her high school GED and started college. She was very smart and very determined, but working and going to school an hour away and leaving her toddler with her unsympathetic grandparents without much help from anyone else was too much for her. It was too hard being away from her baby. She never finished college. She never left their little town in Vermont for very long, except for that year when she was away at college part of the time. She never got married, but she fell in love, and she had people in her life who loved her. Most of all she had Eva. She worked hard on the farm and in the ice cream shop and a lot of other jobs around town too. She was always cheerful, always laughing, and Eva says she can’t remember a day in her life when she couldn’t make her mother laugh. She sacrificed and made ends meet and did what she had to do and she was a good mom, she made a good life for her daughter, just the two of them. She lived for Eva. She was a great mother and a great woman, everyone who knew her says she was sweet and funny and generous and loving, and it is so plain to see she really loved her little girl, because her little girl grew up into a beautiful woman who is so full of love. I want to thank her for all of that. She’s one of my heroes.

Tomorrow is Evie’s birthday. She was born twenty-five years ago to a woman I wish so much I could have known, and who I wish were still around for me to thank for so many things. This is Evie’s first birthday with the Island, last year she was here for Elise’s funeral and then she left to go home to Vermont to see her family and spend her birthday with them. This birthday she’s mine, and every birthday from now on. Tomorrow we’ll be celebrating for both Evie and her mother. After all, she wouldn’t even have a birthday tomorrow without a little help from her mom.

I want to tell her mother that her baby is loved and treasured and adored. I want her to know Eva will always have a home full of love, with me and Rachel and the Island, and we will always love her and never let her down. I want to tell her what a great job she did as a mother, even though she didn’t get to see how just how beautiful her daughter turned out to be as a grown-up woman. Beautiful and loving and full of joy. But I’m sure she knew that, and she knows all about it now. I want to tell Evie’s mother that Evie is part of a happy family now. I love her daughter just as much as she did, and I always will.

And I want her to know we will always laugh at a jumping cow. Now let’s get those hooves in motion, girls, the moon needs more milk!

Happy birthday, baby.

Caitie

 

 

 

 

The Island is snowed in. There’s a blizzard blanketing the Island tonight and the Snow Gods are partying out there like there's no tomorrow and no such thing as spring. All boats on the Island are safely anchored at harbor, but one little boat of ours is taking shelter tonight in a harbor far away, in her dorm room at her school, and we want her home with us. Soon. Maybe tomorrow, if our icebreaker can reach her, far off in the frozen South. Ciara, baby, don’t worry, we’ll get you here, and Kelly is safe with us. We’ll keep her warm for you.
    Last weekend it was so sunny and beautiful. Spring had fairly sprung. It was 75 degrees here and we had the Island’s first official pool party of the spring. It was a little shivery sometimes, popping up out of the heated pool and catching the brisk spring breezes fresh off the mountains on our winter-pale pre-bikini-season goose-bumpy skin, brrrrrr, but it was so much fun and so sweet to sit in the sunshine and pretend spring would never end. Tonight it’s 15 degrees with a five-below-zero wind chill full of blowing snow and we’re snowed in by a massive state-wide blizzard. We have a foot of snow on the ground some places and more on the way by morning. And this is the final weekend of spring break for most college kids here in Colorado. After dinner we were splashing in the hot tub out on the deck above the pool, watching it snow and toasting the Snow Gods with ice-cold champagne and wishing we could really toast them, with something red-hot that would leave a burn mark on their icy buns, but our noses kept getting cold. So now we’re inside warming our noses and toeses by the fire. Last weekend: Naked water angels in the pool. This weekend: Naked snow angels in the garden. Ah, Springtime in the Rockies!
    There are ten of us here tonight and if I-25 is open tomorrow we will make eleven for the weekend. We will be eleven this weekend, by one snowy road or another. This summer the Island will officially grow to eleven, and we are eleven now, in all but pomp and ceremony, and the signing and swearing and sharing of blood, and a few other little symbolic rites of passage. There are still some minor issues and dates for us to work out, but the most important things are already working. Three things we have all agreed upon as fundamental to us are all firmly in place for the Island to grow to eleven: Love. Commitment. Vision, our very particular and unique vision of our shared future as a family we call the Island. There are endless complications and nuances for us to resolve inside all three of those things, but for tonight it’s more than enough that we’re warm and safe and happy and in love and (almost) all together.
    A toast by the fire, to the two loves of my life, Rachel and Eva: To the end of this amazing month, and to the end of an incredible year that has changed all of our lives, and to the beginning of a new life together this spring. To Stella: Just because I love you. To my baby sister: Ciara, come home soon! We need you, baby! There is a place waiting for you here in our hearts, a place no one on this Island can fill but you. To the Blizzard Gods: You took your best shot, dudes. You landed a hell of a punch, but it’s no knockout. We’re taking it outside with you, icy dudes, it’ll be Snow Gods vs. Snow Angels, and you are so going down. Face down in your own snow. Because you can never hold back spring.
    And to the Island, everyone on the Island, tonight and in the future and forever after: To us.

Caitie

One year ago tonight a phone call changed my life. All our lives. Forever. The voice on the phone was telling me from very far away that someone I once loved was dead. Her name was Elise. That voice was the voice of someone I would soon find myself falling in love with. Her name was Eva. One life was ending and another was beginning and that night for me, for all of us, was the bend in the road. Tonight that phone didn’t ring, not for us anyway, but our lives are changing again. Probably forever. Forever is my favorite word tonight.

It’s a lovely soft cool night here. The dark of the moon, a mist of spring rain. The St Patrick’s Day party at our favorite Irish bar is still rocking and reeling, but the Island came back home. We made the pilgrimage we needed to make, we trooped the colors, we showed the wearing of the green, we showed off the Island like never before, we stomped and strutted and fell down laughing and we went to the place where that phone call came to me one year ago tonight—and the only call that came to all of us was the call of home. That was the call we were waiting for. We couldn’t wait to come back home tonight! Everyone wanted to go home and just be the Island again. Everything in the world that I really love is right here tonight. This is the center of my world.

I’ve never had a home like this before, not until Rachel and I came back together. I’ve never been loved like this before, not until Rachel and Eva filled up my life. I've never been able to love like this before, not until I fell in love with these people, this family. Forever. I’ve never had a family like this before, not until the Island started to take shape around the six of us—and then the eight of us—and then the nine of us. And now tonight—the eleven of us.

The eleven of us on the Island are only staying up until this St Patrick’s Day midnight is dead and buried in the holy ground. And then we’re taking the candles and the rainy night and all eleven of us to bed, to dare and dream and love but not to sleep, not until deep in the dead of night. We have too much love to make first, new love and old love and star-crossed love, and I have a date to keep with my new girl. Until then we’re dancing in the kitchen by candlelight and laughing and drinking the last of the Guinness, dancing out the clock by the dark of the moon until the dregs of this St Patrick’s Day are dead and drunk and done with, and the awful memory of that phone call one year ago tonight has been buried for all time. And I’m writing this tonight in the last of the night, before the clock ticks over the twelve and the day will be done, and since that fateful phone call it will be a year and a day, and a brand-new day.

We’re dancing and drinking tonight to the past that phone call ended, and to the future that phone call began. I’m drinking to the Island and to the ones I love. Forever. The eleven of us.

Caitie

 

 

Thank you, Miss Ciara! My Owners and I are so happy that you love your birthday presents. I am very proud to serve you. Thank you.


Your birthday slave girl Eva

Love breaks every law.

Love is always right, no matter who you love, whether that love is right or wrong in the eyes of the world. When you love someone, you create a new world with them, a world you can share. In that world, loving and owning and belonging are just different words for the same thing: Love.

When you truly own something, you want to share it. You can share it. Sharing it doesn’t diminish your ownership of it, or make your love for it less. Sharing it makes your love for that beautiful thing grow, and your love grows for the ones you share it with. When you own something beautiful, something you love so much it fills your heart to overflowing, you want to share that beautiful thing with the others who are inside your heart. And when you own something—or someone—who loves you just as much as you love her, sharing her love with another makes the love you share grow, not diminish. Giving more love gives you more love to give. Without love, the world would be empty. Love breaks every law of the physical world and the human world. Love is the only thing that can arise from nothing and grow to fill the world.

Love breaks every law, except its own law: Loving creates more love.

And so tonight, we will create a new world—

Caitie

 

 

I gave her the full moon last night. When the moon was rising I called her at school and told her to run outside and look at the birthday present I sent her. She said, “Cool! I’ll take it! Can I have another for Kelly?” I said, No, this one’s just for you, but you can moon Kelly all you want this weekend at our place. She said she’d keep the moon for herself, and she’d just give Kelly the stars.

My baby sister Ciara is nineteen today. Happy birthday, baby! She’s a beautiful woman, my very favorite sister by a billion light-years, one of my very favorite people in the whole world, and there’s no one in the whole world like her. Except me, Rachel says. She’s starting to give me The Look when I call her my “baby sister,” so I know I’ll have to cut out the baby stuff soon. Maybe when she turns twenty-one, how’s that sound, baby? Her Spring Break starts today too, and she’s spending most of it with the Island. Her girlfriend Kelly is at a different school, and her Spring Break starts the day Ciara goes back to school, which is grossly unfair, a clear violation of the Universal Synchronized Spring Break Code of Girls Gone Wild, so the only way they can spend part of their Spring Breaks together is, guess where, with us, on the Island.

Ciara played our mother like a Stradivarius to get her to sign off on this plan. She told Mom that since she couldn’t be with Kelly for Spring Break, she was thinking of just going to Mexico with her girls from school. Mexico?! Her baby girl (there I go with that baby thing again) wanted to put herself in harm’s way of out-of-control Mexican drug-gang warfare? Ciara put up a convincing fuss over needing to go to Mexico with her girls. After all, she said, Caitie and her girls used to get to go to Mexico on Spring Break from college, so why can’t I?! Mom suggested Lake Havasu or South Padre Island as safer alternatives. Ciara sniffed dismissively at Arizona and Texas and told her all the other cool kids were going to Mexico, to Cabo and Cancun, where Caitie used to go.

Meanwhile I was gasping for air. Our mother is seriously suggesting South Padre? Does she have any idea of the sheer shameless wantonness of Spring Break on South Padre Island? I had a great time on South Padre one Spring Break, that’s how wanton it is— Ciara counterattacked with the Bahamas, how some other friends from school were going on some cruise in the Bahamas, and how it might cost a little more than Mexico, but if Mexico was really out of the question, then it was the Bahamas or nothing! A cruise? The Bahamas?! Mom hardened her position and drew the line at Ciara leaving the country at all for Spring Break. Ciara threw a convincing hissy fit (yes, our mother still calls that act a “hissy fit”), and Mom said, Well young lady, maybe you shouldn’t even think about going anywhere for Spring Break! Ciara said, Fine! Go ahead! Ruin my life! If I can’t go to the Bahamas or Mexico, I’ll just go hang out with Caitie all week! (And become a lesbian, was the unspoken subtext here.) Fine, my mother said, you do that! Spend every damned second with Caitie and her friends if that will make you happy! But Mexico is out! And they both stomped off in a huff, separate huffs, and that was the end of that discussion.

Ciara told me later she thought that went really well. We both knew she’d never had the slightest intention of going anywhere for Spring Break that didn’t include her girl Kelly and the Island. She also said she thought Mom was finally mellowing a bit in her old age.

She’s partying with her girls at school tonight, the ones flying to Mexico in the morning. (They’re actually going to South Padre.) We’ll all be at our folks’ house tomorrow night for her big family birthday dinner, and the maternal huff has largely evaporated by now. But Friday night she and Kell will be here with us on the Island. The Island will have our own birthday party for my beautiful baby sister on turning nineteen. And Rachel and Evie and I have one very special surprise gift for her, among all her birthday presents. Kelly knows all about it and she can’t wait, the surprise present can’t wait, Rachel can’t wait, the Island can’t wait, and I can’t wait. But Ciara doesn’t know anything about it, and she’ll just have to wait. And gaze at the full moon I gave her.

The moon will be a little past full by Friday night, but I’d give my beautiful baby sister much more than the moon and the stars, if I could. And I will.

Caitie

 

 

She's here!

Or rather, she's over there. The Queen of the entire Island has finally made her long-awaited debut, over on the Island's other blog, Stella's stelladellasera . And about time too, baby. Welcome to Blogland, Luce!

Rachel

It's like a death in the family. It is a death in the family. She almost made it to her 150th birthday, but she won't, not after today's announcement of her impending death, unless a last-minute white knight rides to her rescue. Tomorrow is her last day on earth. The Rocky Mountain News will publish her last newspaper tomorrow. The News is dead. Long live the News.

The Island will be having a funeral wake for the Rocky Mountain News tomorrow night. We'll buy a bundle of last-issue newspapers. We'll save some for posterity, and we'll burn one entire issue of the poor old Rocky, the oldest newspaper in Colorado. After tomorrow, Denver will no longer be a two-newspaper town. We were one of the very last major US cities with two major, world-class, competitive and contentious and Pulitzer prize-winning newspapers, each battling year after year to make you read the news their way, vote for politicians their way, see the world their way, even read the comics their way. The Denver Post will survive, at least for a while, but the Rocky will be no more. Nearly everyone here has called it "the Rocky" for as long as I can remember, but my dad tells me when he was a kid it was known simply as "the News," as opposed to the Other Paper, the Denver Post, known as "the Post." When you said around Denver, "What's in the news today?" you meant, "What's in the Rocky Mountain News?"

Growing up in Denver you're either a Rocky family or a Post family. My family is a diehard rock-ribbed Rocky family, Rachel's is a Post family. No wonder they're so different. Stella's was a Post family too, but Annie's and Ronnie's families were both Rocky families. Seldom would one family be both, it was considered a little weird, a little suspicious, but it did happen. Lucia's family has always read both papers: Her dad always says he has to buy both papers just to read both sets of comic strips. The Rocky was always the noisy morning tabloid, scrappy and opinionated and historically a little (or a lot) to the right. The Post was for a long time the more elegant evening broadsheet, a little more dignified, a little (or a lot) more to the left. Their rivalry was legendary.

Before my time the Post had already become a morning paper in order to survive against the Rocky, and the Rocky had become a little classier and a little less tabloid, and the big political and cultural differences between them had started to diminish. Several years ago, when I was in college, their brutal, decades-long newspaper rivalry skidded to a dead-even tie when they nearly bankrupted each other in a circulation war, which led to a merger of the business operations of the two papers. The merger let them survive for a few years as competing independent newsrooms with independent editorial page voices, but the differences were now much more muted and mostly stylistic. But most native Denverites are still fiercely loyal to one paper or the other--unless all you read is Westword and the web. (I love Westword, but the other little papers here don't even count as real newspapers.) All that ends tomorrow.

The Rocky put herself on the market to find a savior last December, but there were no buyers. The paper was losing something like $15 million a year. No one wanted to take her on and spend $100 million just to try to keep the paper alive in a business that's rapidly disappearing. We all knew the Rocky probably wouldn't survive, but until today we didn't know she would die tomorrow. The Post is the only survivor of this legendary newspaper war, and no one knows how long the Post has to live either. Denver might soon become something worse than a one-newspaper town: a no-newspaper town. Where will we get both sides of the story? Where will we get even one side of the story? And where will we read the funny pages? Where will I read "Doonesbury"?! The daily news of the world is too awful to bear without the comics. And without the Rocky.

Good-bye, Rocky. We loved you. We'll never forget you.

Caitie

The Pretenders are the talk of the town tonight. They're playing here at the Paramount tonight on their Break Up the Concrete Tour, and we’ll be there, the entire Island and some other friends. The Pretenders are still one of my primal images from my teenage childhood of what a rock band should look and sound like--even though they’re my parents’ age now. Or even older. Shocking. Disheartening. Probably technically impossible in fact, and they rock too hard to die, so to hell with the impossible fact that Chrissie Hynde is older than my father.

You are what you hear. When I was a teenager hanging with Rachel at her house I heard all the late seventies and early eighties rock I’d mostly missed at my house and at Lucia’s house, where Lucia and I had grown up hearing Steeleye Span and Fairport Convention and the Chieftains and the Clancy Brothers and Tommy Makem and Sandy Denny and all things folk and folk-rock and Irish and Scottish and Celtic. My folks had been into rock and roll when they were kids in the sixties and early seventies, but when rock fragmented in the mid seventies into pompous progressive rock and bombastic arena rock and ugly and pointless (to them) punk rock, they fled back into Celtic and British folk music and country and classical and baroque and even opera. As far as I can tell, they never bought a rock LP again after about 1977, and then I happened to them in 1981 with more baby daughters on the way right behind me, and it was lullaby land and Sesame Street time. The rockingest music I ever heard at home when I was little was Steeleye Span, the soundtrack of my preteen life, and I still adore Steeleye Span. Steeleye Span might not quite rock, but they sure can roll.

But suddenly I was twelve and there was Rachel. Rachel rocked. She so rocked. I needed to rock too. And Rachel had big brothers! Two big brothers who rocked. Big brothers are a blessing that Lucia and I missed out on at home in our own families, being the big sisters of baby sisters and not a brother in sight. Or a very mixed blessing that we didn’t miss a bit, depending on what day you ask us. Rachel’s brothers were rockers and they were in bands and had a band of their own for a while, and what they were into was punk and New Wave and classic rock and British Invasion and blues and lots of other stuff I never heard at my house (except the Beatles of course, and sometimes I could sneak a little MTV onto the tube). It was the mid nineties when Rachel and I got to be teenagers, but her brothers sneered at mid nineties music, they were into all the old stuff I’d missed out on, from punk on. They especially loved hard rock bands with tough chick singers, and Chrissie Hynde was a goddess to these guys. To us too. She sang like a chick and rocked like a guy and she could write songs like nobody else and she broke hearts. Her heart could be broken too, but she’d hurt you for it, and she was hardcore New Wave rock-chick coolness itself. She’s crazy, but she’s a rock chick, she's supposed to be crazy.

Rachel and I grew up loving and abusing all her brothers’ vinyl LPs, and a couple of years ago they gave them all to her. All of them. Opening those cardboard boxes was like opening our middle school yearbooks: Pretenders, Motels, Missing Persons, Patty Smith, Elvis Costello, the Clash, Robin Lane and the Chartbusters, Talking Heads, Sonic Youth, Romeo Void, Berlin, Tourists, Wire, Eurythmics, Dire Straits, Pixies, Bangles, Sex Pistols, B-52s,  and a thousand others. And local bands, like the Young Weasels, Mau Mau 55, Crank Call Love Affair, Cage of Reason, the Gluons, the Aviators, the Varve, the Guys (who were of course all girls), and her brothers' own bands, literally thousands of LPs and singles and cassettes and bootlegs, even reels of reel-to-reel tape from sessions and live dates. We still haven’t played them all, not nearly. Every box a time capsule.

But we dug out the Pretenders the very first thing. Pretenders and Pretenders II and Extended Play and Learning to Crawl. Songs we lived inside when we were thirteen and fourteen and fifteen and we didn’t care that they were already ten years old or more, as ancient and timeless to us as Child ballads: “Tattooed Love Boys,” “Kid,” “Private Life,” “The Phone Call,” “The Adultress,” “The English Roses,” “I Go to Sleep,” “Talk of the Town,” “Waste Not Want Not,” “Birds of Paradise,” “2000 Miles,” “Brass in Pocket,” “Cuban Slide,” “Back on the Chain Gang,” “My City Was Gone,” “Message of Love.” I’m hoping they play all of those for us tonight and more, along with their stuff from the new CD, like “Break Up the Concrete,” “Love’s a Mystery,” and “Boots of Chinese Plastic.” Once upon a time “Birds of Paradise” was almost an anthem for Rachel and me, it was our song (one of many), and we cried every time we played it. There are more than two birds of paradise now in our lives, and all of us will be rocking the Pretenders tonight. No tears tonight, or Chrissie Hynde will hit you over the head with her Telecaster and really give you something to cry about.

Caitie

And we’re live!
        We’re going to plug this blog back in and flip the switch, just to see if it still lights up. I think it will, and if the circuits are sluggish we’ll just give it more voltage. There. Let’s turn it up to eleven. How’s that? Ow, that tickles! Get those jumper cables off my nipples, girls! See, those eyes are wide open now! It’s alive! Alive! We have blognition!
        There are a lot of reasons why we put this blog on ice over the winter. Good reasons, bad reasons, reasons we weren’t even fully aware of at the time. Reasons we haven’t figured out yet. Maybe we’ll get into that, if there’s a good reason to. We have a very good reason for defrosting it and plugging it back in again and watching it light up: We have things to say, and this is a good place to say them. It might be the only place we can say some of them, except to each other, and we do that all the time anyway. Now we have to tell the world.
        This blog is the LJ voice of Rachel and Eva and me, Caitie, and we’re one of two houses of a family we call the Island. You knew that. The Island needs our voices to be heard again, for our own purposes, for the Island’s purposes, and in support of the principal voice of the other house of the Island, Stella at stelladellasera , soon to be joined there by the voice of the Queen of the entire Island, Lucia. Stella’s trying to put the jumper cables to her own blog to bring it back to life, and we’re here to help her light up the night. We’ve all been a little too quiet on LJ for a little too long, but perhaps we needed to do that. Sometimes you need to work out the urgent problem at the blackboard in front of the whole class, and sometimes working it out in public helps you make sense of it as you go along. But sometimes you just need to go away and build that science project quietly in your basement with no one watching you. After the dust settles from the massive explosions, if you survive you crawl from the wreckage and dust yourself off and go hand in your report, or what’s left of it. So here’s our report. What’s left of it.
        The Island is still here, after the explosions. There are nine of us now, in three couples and one triple in two households, and this summer (or some summer) we might explode to eleven, in God knows how many households. We survived the fall and the winter and we’re ready for spring. Spring isn’t ready for us yet, but we’re standing by. Impatiently. We survived some of us going to Portugal last fall while some of us went to Alaska and Vermont and some of us stayed home in Colorado. We survived Hurricane Aurora and the resulting massive storm damage to the Old Island. We survived the Island adding one new couple, opening our doors to a possible future second new couple, and adding a third to an existing couple and turning it into a triple. (I love you both with all my heart, Rachel and Evie, and I’ll write that on every blackboard I ever get my chalk on.) We survived the couple on the edge of the Island breaking up and coming back together. We survived an Inferno of slave training, and a Purgatorio of probation for the new couple and the new triple, and we all happily ascended into a Paradiso of a New Island, the Insula Nova that emerged from the wreckage of the Old Island. Whatever we were before, we survived tearing it down and rethinking it and rebuilding it, and we’re a constitutional monarchy now, ruled by a Prime Minister, or perhaps a Queen--we still haven’t quite decided what to call her (it probably depends on whether she wants the job for life or not)--and we like it better this way. We survived Halloween and Christmas and New Year’s and we survived big changes in jobs and old jobs coming to an end and big promotions into new jobs and uncertainties about college plans and grad school plans and housing plans and career plans and every other kind of plan. We survived the Wall Street Crash and the Great Recession (so far) and our latest serious crisis, which I’ll call for the moment The Taming of the Blind Pony. A long story, and not mine to tell (but I’ll help if she needs me to). We survived the first big party of Island Birthday Season 2009 and Valentine’s Day and a second anniversary for a Very Important Couple here and the triumphant coming of the Four Pink Ponies of the Apocalypse (another long story). We’ve just survived the trauma of some of us turning the very advanced age of twenty-eight while some of us are still facing the horror of being just about to turn twenty-eight, while others of us have callously displayed the shocking insensitivity of stubbornly remaining much younger. But we are all still here, still alive, still together, still in love, and the Island is stronger and happier than ever.
        I’m out of chalk and out of blackboard and out of time and that’s the end of this report. Now that we have this thing up and running again, we’ll try not to let the lights go out for very long, but no promises. Sometimes you just have to turn off all the lights upstairs and disappear down into the basement and build another science project. We’ll try to warn everyone before the next explosion, but science projects are unpredictable. That’s the fun part. No, that’s wrong, loving these people and getting to build a life with them, that’s the fun part. The explosions are just a bonus.

Caitie

Happy New Year from the Island! We are a New Island now: Insula Nova. The New Island has been designed and redesigned and built and rebuilt and tested and retested, and tomorrow we will all rejoin the Island officially and wash it down with champagne, and Insula Nova will be our new home. Don’t worry, you’ll still recognize the old place. The drinks out by the pool still have little umbrellas in them, even on New Year’s Eve, the pool is still warm, the champagne is still cold, and the Island natives are still just as friendly. But bring your own beach towel. (Oh never mind, you can use one of ours, they're all new too.)

To the Island’s friends and family near and far: May the new year bring you love and light, life and joy, safe harbor and high seas, high adventure and the comforts of home. May your seas be calm, may the wind be at your back, and may the sun be ever shining where you roam.

Rachel and Caitlin and Eva, Lucia and Stella, Veronica and Anna, Daniel and Joshua, and our special guests, Ciara and Kelly: the New Island, Insula Nova

For the Island, for our friends and family far and near, for all the ships at sea, I wish fair weather and clear skies, smooth sailing and safe harbors. And for those who have wandered far and have returned home, a warm homecoming. A very warm homecoming.

We have weathered a storm on the Island, but now we’re safe and dry and we’re busy repairing the roof. And the walls. And the foundations. And the verandah and the boathouse and the dock, and oh yeah we may have lost a few beach blankets in the breeze too, but not to worry, the sun is shining and the storm warnings are down. One of the winds in this perfect storm was a gale that Lucia and Stella thought they had laid to rest in Portugal, but it followed them home like a wailing ghost. Another big wind blew across the Atlantic from the UK and swept us up into a perfect hurricane, and we were just on the edge of that storm, thank God we weren’t in the center. A gale from a different point of the compass, from roughly my direction, threatened to capsize small craft on the very shores of the Island. And another wind was lying coiled like a serpent at the very heart of the Island, waiting to uncoil itself into a tornado and blow us all to kingdom come.

But the storm is over! We survived by tearing down the Old Island and building a New Island in its place. The new foundations are stronger, the new doors don’t creak, the new walls keep the wind out, and there’s a better view out to sea from up here on the new balcony. You’d have to look hard to see the differences, but every window and wall and floor and joist and hinge and nail has been replaced or rebuilt, and there’s a new wing of the big house I’ll show you later. But first, the lighthouse is lit and we are sending a message out to sea, a message of love.

To our friends far away who came through the eye of the storm, who weathered far worse than we did and who have come through shining and new, we love you. All of you, every single one of you, without exception. We are proud to know you. We’re proud to be your friends. We’re proud if the Island helped you even one tiny little bit. You have helped us even more. The storm is over, the sun is shining, and it’s time for us to finish fixing that roof. Meet us at sunset on the Island for drinks with little umbrellas in them. And champagne.

And to those who have wandered and have returned and are beginning a new life, welcome home.

Caitie

It's finally election night and we’re winning! And losing. And neck and neck and pulling ahead and falling behind and still wondering how it will turn out. It’s not over yet, the numbers are still out on a couple of ballot issues here, but the biggest part of it is over, and we’re winning. The Island went through endless conflicts and inner turmoil and shouting matches and food fights. We had big problems with everyone running for everything this year, and we don’t like everything about any of them. Most of them we don’t like at all. But we’re winning on the big ones, and we were part of making American history tonight. And it didn’t even matter, we’d be just as happy (almost) if we were losing, because our biggest win of all was that the whole Island voted together as a bloc for the first time. All nine of us voted the same way on every contest, in so far as we could, though we live in two different precincts so we didn’t have all the same little local races to vote on. But we voted together and we won.

We’re all over the map politically. Not just the nine of us as a group, but every single one of us in the Island is all over the map. Each of us in the course of this election campaign seemed to have six contradictory opinions for every issue. (Eva says she only had three.) This campaign was exhausting and exasperating. We’re split and divided in every way, we’re red and blue and purple, left, right and center, radical and traditional, conservative and liberal, progressive and reactionary, anarchistic and communitarian and libertarian and libertine. We never fit in very comfortably anywhere with anyone’s politics. We love watching politics as a bloodsport, but we also hate politics. We have some extended family members in politics and we know too much about it to love it. We’ve all gotten equally disgusted with Dumbocrats and Retardicans and every other stupid party, organized and disorganized. But we vote, as agonizing as it usually is. And we made a serious commitment to work out some way for all of us to vote the same way, so we could speak with one voice and nobody’s vote got canceled out. If we had conflicts and controversies, we were committed to work them out ourselves. We did.

Slaves on the Island (including me) are required to vote exactly as our Owners direct us to vote. Almost a month ago the Owners on the Island (not including me, for purposes of voting) formed two committees (Lucia plus my Owner Rachel, and Ronnie plus Danny). Each committee put together their own analysis and a complete ballot proposal for every contest, the presidential and senatorial and state legislative races and fourteen ballot initiatives of varying significance. Sunday in our Star Chamber we ironed out the few remaining points of contention, and everyone, slaves and Owners alike, got to shout as long and as loud as we wanted. It turned out to be much easier than we expected. All of our remaining disagreements had been shaken out over the last month of the campaign. We had a winner. Most of the shouting was for more champagne.

Our Owners put together a consensus ballot for us, and we all, every one of us, swore on our honor to vote as the Island had decided to vote as a group. And we did. And we won, mostly. Most of all we found a way to vote with one voice. That might not be important to every family, but it was important to us. We’re going to be together for life, so we need to be sure we can make group decisions that affect our future and commit to them and pull together in the same direction as a cohesive unit. We do that all the time, but this was one more little test of our ability to do that, and we passed the test. That’s our own electoral victory tonight.

And oh yeah, we won on the big one! Here’s hoping we’re all winners tonight.

Caitie

We’re home, we’re home, we’re home! This is my home now, here with Caitie and Rachel and the Island. We're home and everything is all good. We got home to Colorado late Saturday night after driving from Vermont to New York in the pouring rain and then we had just the worst possible flight here from New York and when we got here we were all so tired we were just falling down laughing we could barely stand up. Ronnie and Danny were there at the airport after waiting for us forever and they grabbed us and kissed us and held us together and we all cried and then they drove us right to their place so they could all take care of us, and we walked in the door and Joshie and Annie came running to jump all over me and Caitie and Rachel and we all just fell right down on the floor inside the door and started crying.

Oh god I was crying. I was so happy to be home again I just cried my eyes out. This is my home. Not with my family in Vermont, not anymore. My home is wherever Rachel and Caitie are, they’re my family. This is my home and my family. Alaska was really fun to go back to but it will never be home again without Elise and Vermont with my family was pretty unbelievably great and wow I know I’ll never get to make a Victory Tour like that one again unless I go back to see them with a baby in my arms just to show them I can do it all and Caitie says Baby let’s not hold our breath on that but then again she says who knows baby, maybe someday! So maybe baby, but coming home here was the very very very best part of going away. The very best part.

And we were barely home half the night and we just barely got to finally take a nap all curled up with Annie and Joshie and I sort of half woke up and Danny and Ronnie were leaving again for the airport! And they came back with Lucia and Stella from Portugal! OH MY GOD WE’RE ALL HOME AGAIN!!! Stella and Lucia both hugged me and all of us so tight like they hadn’t seen us in a year and we were all crying and crying all over again and it was so good. My grampa has this cranky saying he says about how home is just where the key fits the lock he says but that isn’t it at all Grampa, home is where you cry when you leave and you cry when you come back and everyone cries with you coming and going and they’re sorry to see you go away and happy when you come back home and your heart just jumps into your throat when you walk through the door and see them and you never want to leave ever again, that’s where home is. I am so the baby here and I know it, I’ve only been here a couple of months now but already this is my home this is my home and it feels like it always has been and it feels like somehow I was out there wandering around out in the world lost and wondering where my home was and it was right here waiting for me all along. Lost and found, like me.

Thank you, Caitie and Rachel, for loving me and wanting me to be part of your life and making your home my home and taking me with you and taking me on a victory tour of the places that used to be my homes before I found my real home with you. I love you I love you I love you. Thank you everybody, the whole Island, for loving me and wanting me and taking me in and not laughing at me when I fell in love with you so hard with my whole heart and I was all of a sudden asking you to let me stay and be part of the Island with you and I was so afraid that maybe you wouldn't want me after all but you did and all of a sudden I was right where I belonged all along. Thank you for wanting me. Thank you Caitie most of all for loving me almost as much as I love you (you couldnt possibly love me as much it just isnt possible is it? oh maybe it is oh baby I love you) and taking me right into your heart and amazing me and loving me like no one has ever loved me before. Your heart is my home and I will love you always and belong to you always and wherever you are is where my home is.

PS… Stella says tonight if I make a wish on a star she’ll make sure it comes true, because tonight is their magic anniversary night and she says tonight she’s got extra evening star magic wishing powers and so tonight she can make true heart wishes come true. Hi Stell! Thanks baby but my big big big wishes already came true or coming true and most of my little ones too so can I just have some extra wishes to pass around? I’ll just wish for everyone on the Island to always be happy and have their heart’s desire and stay together and be in love always and forever, thats an easy one right? and I'll help make it happen. World peace would be nice too Stell, so can I sneak that one in too? If anyone can do it baby you can. And I have one very special secret heart's desire wish for Caitie and I’m saving that magic wish for her and I’m going to make that wish come true for my Caitie myself, every single day.

Eva

 

 

Hi everybody! We’re still in Vermont till tomorrow! Everything is beautiful here, we’re having the most wonderful time, we’ve seen everyone and gone everywhere and done everything and we just talked to the whole Island this morning and everyone is incredibly well and happy and we’ll all be home this weekend! Rachel and Caitie and I have been having the most unbelievably amazing time and things are going so good for us and we have done so much and I am so so so happy. Thank you, both of you. I’ll never ever forget this. I can’t wait to go home with you. Our home, the three of us. Home home home.

Eva

We made it! We flew into Albany today from Alaska and and what a whack flight that was and we picked up the car and drove right to Vermont. My little Vermont is being so beautiful for us, I’m so proud of my little state being so good so I can show it off to the women I love. It was a beautiful day, the leaves are absolutely peak color and the tourists are all gone and all the hills are just blazing still, I was hoping the foliage would hang on just long enough for us to get here and it really did, and it’s a full moon tonight or tomorrow and now we’re at the inn in my home town in front of the fireplace in our room and I’m with the two women I love most in the whole world and everything is good.

Alaska went really well, Rachel is so happy with how her business deal went there and we were really really busy every minute and it snowed every day, but she says it all went like clockwork. Rachel says I’m their good luck charm and they’re going to take me everywhere with them, and this is all I ever want to do, this is my job now, World, I’m just gonna go everywhere with Rachel and Caitie and bring them good luck. They are so much fun to travel with and be with, Caitie says we’re all mentally about thirteen years old together but that’s not true, I’m totally the thirteen year old, Caitie is about seventeen and Rachel is twenty one and in charge and we’re all so good together it’s like we really all knew each other forever. And I got to show Rachel and Caitie off at all the places Elise and I used to work in Anchorage. You should have seen everyone fall off their stools when we all strutted in together! The first place I ever danced half the girls I knew there are gone now already but my girlfriend Suzi I shared a mirror with in the dressing room is still there and Suze about fell off the stage in just her stripper heels the other night when we all walked in all leather and fur and diamonds and I hollered “Hey boys Eva’s back in town! Drinks all around! Drinks are on me!” (Caitie’s orders.) Suzi hugged me and hugged me and they couldn’t pour the good stuff fast enough and we just about owned the place in about five minutes.

Suzi dragged me up on stage with her and so I did a couple of turns around the stage with her arm in arm and I waved at all the regulars and blew kisses and I did a couple of big spins around the pole and I got a standing ovation and holy cow I didn’t even take my dress off! And the next night at the last place I worked, the one they rescued me from, my old boss was actually happy to see me and she said the drinks were on her and she made me sit on the bar so everyone could look at me. I always kinda liked her in spite of how she could be a real bitch sometimes, she’s a tough lady and she was always pretty fair to me. Later I was telling her what I was doing now and what the deal was, not the whole deal but the parts I’m allowed to tell people like her, and she was saying something to me at the bar about how “Jesus Christ Eva didn’t you just fuckin trip in the shit and land in the clover!” And Caitie thought that was about the funniest thing she’d heard my old boss lady say all night and I was nodding and laughing and going Yeah didn’t I fuckin ever! And later I got to take over the whole center stage for a couple of minutes so I could do a little strut and spin and spread and show it off for the boys, just a little of the tease without any of the stripping, and I got a big hand again so maybe all this teasing and not stripping act is a really good career move for me. I hope so, cause I only get to strip at home now.

Tomorrow afternoon we’re going to go see my grandparents out on the farm and they’re expecting us and they say they want us to stay for dinner with the whole family and this is going to be SO. FUCKING. WEIRD.  But I can do anything with Rachel and Caitie with me. We keep figuring this out over and over and over, that I can do anything with them right beside me and me beside them. Caitie says she’ll let me post something again later this week and she might even want to say something here too, so goodnight for now from Rachel and Caitie and me, Eva, here in the beautiful moonlight in Vermont.

Eva

 

 

The Island is in diaspora mode and we’ll be scattering all over the world this Friday. We’re bad, we’re nationwide, we’re worldwide. Stella says it’s my turn to pick up the story before we explode away in every direction. Rachel agrees with her, so here I am, the roving foreign correspondent for the Island. At least I’m not writing this sitting in the airport waiting to fly, like our last couple of trips.

Portugal. Lucia and Stella are flying to Lisbon Friday for two weeks, all on their own. No shoes, no news, no blogging, no— I nearly wrote no flogging, but I’m sure that won’t be the case. They haven’t really called it this yet, so I will: This is a honeymoon for them. They’ve been together as Owner and slave for two years this month and this is their second anniversary honeymoon. We were all going to tag along, the whole  Island, that was the original plan, and they would have loved us coming along. We would have made them love having us along. But it’s better this way. They deserve another honeymoon all alone. They need to get away from all of us, back to the center of each other’s worlds, each other. Rachel and I were with them there last summer, and we’ll make them show us all Portugal next year. Lucia says they’ll be offline to everyone but us and their moms until they get back, so Stella’s blog will be on vacation for two weeks too.

Danny and Josh have a field trip to make on the Western Slope if the weather lets them, so they’ll probably be gone for a week while the rest of us are gone for two weeks. And Ronnie and Annie will stay here and do a big project of their own, and hold down the Island for all of us. Ciara and Kelly will probably be here off and on too, and they’ll be spending the weekend in the middle at our place. Stella and I don’t say nearly enough about Ronnie and Annie on these blogs, partly because Ronnie kind of prefers it that way, but have I mentioned that they are the foundation and roots of the whole Island? We wouldn’t all be here if not for them. The rest of us have provided some of the more spectacular stormy weather on the Island, thunder and lightning and waves that drive the boats ashore, but Ronnie and Annie are the solid ground that the storms rage across and leave unmoved. We are all of us here great loving couples and triples and our biochemistry as a group is nothing short of supernatural, but Ronnie and Annie are simply the best couple I’ve ever known. If they ever break up, the Earth will wobble off its axis and life as we know it will be doomed. Ronnie and Annie will make sure this never happens, so I know the Island will be safe and dry and waiting when the rest of us return.

Alaska and Vermont. Rachel and Eva and I have two very different trips to make, back to back. Rachel’s Alaska project is evolving and she needs to put “boots on the ground” as they say and redirect the troops. The Wall Street crash keeps remaking and remodeling the business world every day, and this is a reflection of that. The project there is in very good shape, the work is going well, the financing is solid, but one of her company’s local partners is not. That partner is withdrawing from the project, so Rachel and her dad are stepping in and buying them out. They’ll own a bigger piece of the pie now, and the pie is cooking along nicely, in spite of the economy falling apart all around us. If you’re liquid in this economy, and Rachel’s company made some very smart decisions a while ago so they are very liquid, you can keep working and making money, and pick up some bargains that other people are dropping in a panic. So we’ll fly to Anchorage Friday, have a couple of meetings over the weekend and close the deal Monday, stay at Eva and Elise’s old place near Girdwood that Rachel bought from Eva to get her out from under the crushing mortgage and which is now the project headquarters, and drop in on some of Eva’s old hangouts to show off our prize from our last trip to Alaska: Eva.

That’s part of the second reason for this trip. We’re calling this part Eva’s Victory Parade. We want to show her off, she wants to show us off, and we’ll drag her through the Crazy Horse and every other club she danced at in Anchorage, rub their noses in the amazing prize they let slip through their fingers, and laugh over our shoulders as we bolt for the plane. This will be the more fun part of the Alaska trip, and we’re packing the wardrobe for it tonight. But Alaska is just the beginning.

Eva’s Victory Parade: Vermont. Eva grew up first on a dairy farm in central Vermont and then in a little town on the main road north from Bennington to Burlington. Her remaining family and friends in Vermont consist of her grandparents who still live on the dairy farm, her aunt and uncle in town who took her in when her mom was killed in a car accident while Eva was in high school, some other assorted aunts and uncles and cousins, plus her girlfriends from high school and college. Besides the dairy farm, in her childhood landscape, there was her aunt and uncle’s ice cream shop in town. Eva says among the eternal constants of her childhood memories are cows and ice cream. Just two ends of the same economic process in Vermont. Oh and right in the middle there’s cheese.

Vermont is absolutely worth seeing in the fall anyway, it’s beautiful anytime and in the fall most of all. Eva will show us her own private Vermont too. I passed through Eva’s little town on a family vacation in New England with my folks long ago, it’s right on the main road north and south, you can’t miss it, and if we’d stopped for ice cream there I might have met Eva scooping Cherry Garcia into a sugar cone for me. She would have been adorable at fifteen or so, after all she’s adorable now, and she might have smiled at me over the ice cream counter and our eyes might have met and our fingers might have touched, a little sticky from the Cherry Garcia, and time would have stopped, and just think how all of human history might have changed! Hers and mine, anyway. But my folks and I and my little sister didn’t stop for ice cream, not there at least, and alas one more tempting parallel universe bites the dust.

Eva dropped out of college in Vermont to go to New York City to model, which she was very good at, and that’s where she met Elise, who had once upon a time been my Lizzie, and they fell in love. Events unfolded, happy and otherwise, which took them from New York to Miami and then L.A., and which ended with Elise’s death in Alaska this past spring. And which brought Eva to me and the Island and a home and a new life. Her family are not bad people, from what Eva tells us, just small town people whose entire mental landscape begins with cows on one horizon and ends with ice cream on the other. They still think of Eva as a failure, a scandal, an embarrassment to the family best long gone and forgotten. We’re going there to show them she’s not a failure. She’s a big success.  

They don’t know who Eva is now, and we’re going to show them. Eva says they’ve never really known who she was or what to make of her, so they’re in for a big surprise. She’s changed her life completely from the way they still think of her, and from what she was doing to survive with Elise. I helped her do that, we all did, but it all came first from Eva, her strength, her courage, her love, her faith in herself and in us. Her heart, and she has so much heart. She’s so beautiful and funny and smart and healthy and happy and in love, and she has me and Rachel and the Island and we’re committed to her for life. She has people around her who love her, a home and a family and a future. I love her. She belongs to me, and I’m so proud of her. I can't wait to show her off to Vermont.

We’re going to Vermont to show her family and her old friends the new old Eva, and to let her show us off too, and we plan on knocking their eyes out. They will be stunned by what they see. She’s the most beautiful and loving thing Vermont ever produced, including all that ice cream and those cute cows. We’ll smile, we’ll be gentle, we’ll be sweet, we’ll kill them with kindness. If they’re not willing to be kind to Eva in return, we might have to simply buy the whole dairy farm and the cows and the ice cream shop too, and throw them all out in the street to teach them a lesson. Cows and all. But it won’t come to that. We’ll make Eva a local hero, the hometown girl who made good and who came home in triumph with her two gorgeous girlfriends (us) and knocked the whole town dead with her personal victory parade. And we’ll eat all their ice cream and play in all their pretty autumn leaves and then wave good-bye to Vermont and take Eva back home with us. Her real home. Our home. With me.

Caitie

 

 

This is Eva posting this! And this meme is from Mira at fallen_mira . Thanks MJ! I posted my answers on their blog. Caitie said I could post this here for all three of us, Rachel, Caitie and me, Eva, because we all want to know about everybody. Here are the rules from Mira:

If you’re on my friends list, I want to know 36 things about you. I don’t care if we never talk, or if we already know everything about each other. Short and sweet is fine... You’re on my list, so I want to know you better! Comment here and repost a blank one on your own journal.

I left my answers in, but you can just delete them. Or keep them if you like them!

Eva

01) Are you currently in a serious relationship? Yes! Very. Two of them.
02) What was your dream growing up? To be a model or an actress. I did get to be a model but not so much of an actress.
03) What talent do you wish you had? Oh so many. Acting maybe.
04) If I bought you a drink what would it be? Mango margarita, please.
05) Favorite vegetable? Carrots.
06) What was the last book you read? The Enchanted April. I loved it.
07) What zodiac sign are you? Pisces.
08) Any tattoos and/or piercings? Explain where. Only one tattoo so far, a little blue fish inside my left ankle. Eleven piercings. Earlobes, ear rim, nostril, septum, tongue, lower lip, nipples, belly button, clit hood.
09) Worst habit? Picking up other people’s bad habits. My very worst habits were smoking and cocaine. Models totally live on cigarettes, diet Coke and cocaine. Lots of models anyway. I’m not a model anymore, I’m a slave and those habits are all gone! I’ve been clean for months and months and I’ll never go back.
10) If you saw me walking down the street would you offer me a ride? Yes.
11) What is your favorite sport? Ice skating, but I’m better at watching it than doing it. I can do it too, but I really love watching it.
12) Do you have a pessimistic or optimistic attitude? Optimistic.
13) What would you do if you were stuck in an elevator with me? Make out with you. And hope we stay stuck long enough to have sex. Come on, just a quickie? I can do it quick!
14) Worst thing to ever happen to you? My last partner died this spring. It was drugs. Her name was Elise and we were together for almost exactly three years. I really loved her. But if this never happened the best thing that ever happened to me wouldn’t have happened either.
15) Tell me one weird fact about you.  Sometimes I have dreams that come true.
16) Do you have any pets? No but I had cats growing up.
17) What if I showed up at your house unexpectedly? *excited yelling to my Owners* Caitie Rachel we have company! Lets party!
18) What was your first impression of me? Strong, passionate, very determined.
19) Do you think clowns are cute or scary? Mostly scary.
20) If you could change one thing about how you look, what would it be? I’d just be taller so I could do more runway modeling. Otherwise, pretty okay. But now my looks aren’t up to me anymore, oh so relieved!
21) Would you be my crime partner or my conscience? Partner in crime.
22) What color eyes do you have? Blue.
23) Ever been arrested? No. But I came way too close a couple of times.
24) Bottle or can soda? Bottles. Recycling is good. But I hardly ever drink soda anymore.
25) If you won $10,000 today, what would you do with it? Spend it on beautiful things for Caitie and Rachel. No wait, that’s too much to spend without their permission. I’d give it to Caitie and Rachel and let them decide what to do with it.
27) What’s your favorite place to hang out at? The pool.
28) Do you believe in ghosts? Yes.
29) Favorite thing to do in your spare time? I don’t get much spare time anymore now that I’m a slave. My favoritest thing in the world is to be in bed with my Owners. Next favorite, dancing with the whole Island.
30) Do you swear a lot? No. I say fuck a lot but that’s not swearing, that’s just being friendly. :-)
31) Biggest pet peeve? People doing stupid self-destructive things. Like drugs.
32) In one word, how would you describe yourself? Loving.
33) Do you believe/appreciate romance? Yes yes yes yes yes.
34) Favourite and least favourite food? Favorite: Cherry pie. Least favorite: Lobster.
35) Do you believe in God? Yes. I do now.
36) Will you repost this so I can fill it out and do the same for you? Okay.

Eva

 

 

 

I dreamed last night that I was chained to a rock. I was spreadeagled on this immense rock at the edge of the sea. Chained tight by my wrists and ankles and throat and waist. The chains were thick heavy black iron chains and they were hammered shut so they would never come off me and I couldn’t even move. I remember the hammering when they chained me down, it rang in my ears like the hammering in a blacksmith’s shop.

This was one of those dreams that's like being in a movie, it was pretty intense. There must have been something that happened first, before the rock and the chains, but I can’t remember it now. Maybe I missed that part of the movie. It didn’t feel like I was being punished, I don't remember feeling guilty about anything. I think I was like a sacrifice or an offering to the sea and something was supposed to come out of the sea and take me. I was chained there to wait for it and I was just supposed to wait, the people who chained me there were telling me to wait, just wait. I don’t know who they were, I didn’t know any of them, it was just their job and they just did it and left me there. So I was waiting there all alone, chained to this rock. I couldn’t move anyway. It sounds scary, but it wasn't that scary at the time. I felt like I was supposed to be there. I remember wondering if I was going to die there, but I don't remember feeling afraid yet. I just felt lonely. Lonely and waiting for something.

It felt like I was there for a long time and I remember birds flying over me and screeching at me and sitting around me on the rock. Seagulls and eagles. I remember there were eagles, but they didn’t do anything to me. I think they weren’t allowed to touch me, it felt like I was being given to something bigger than they were and they were afraid of it, whatever it was. I was waiting. I wasn’t really afraid yet, but I was cold and naked and the rock was cold and I kept struggling. But I couldn’t move, the chains were too heavy and they were hammered shut. But the chains felt right to me, like I was meant to be chained like that. I wasn’t afraid of the chains or the rock or the sea, I was only afraid of being left there all alone.

The sea was far away at first but it kept getting closer, like the tide was coming in and then there was water all around the rock. I could feel the cold spray from the waves when they hit the rock. There were strange people around me on the rock too, I don’t know who they were. They were touching me and trying to open my chains. That was scary! They were as cold as the rock I was chained to, it felt like maybe they were part of the rock, like they'd come out of the rock or else maybe they’d come up out of the water. Maybe they were dead people out of the sea? I don't know. This was where I was starting to be really afraid, and not so much of being chained there forever as afraid of them taking me away with them.

Suddenly Caitie was there too and they all ran away from her. That part was amazing! She just scattered them and sent them running in every direction and the birds all scattered and flew away too and the waves were crashing all around. Caitie saved me and opened my chains and picked me up in her arms. The others had been trying to get to me and take me away, but the chains were too heavy and they were hammered shut forever and they’d never come off me. But Caitie just opened them, I don’t know how. They just fell apart when she touched them.

She wrapped some of the chains around me like a collar and a leash and we walked on the sand, away from the rock. I remember feeling wet from the sea but it was warm now, not cold. She told me I was hers now. I was an offering to her, she was what I was waiting for. She was waiting for me too. I asked her if she was a goddess from the sea and she laughed. It seemed funny to me too, we both laughed. But she held me in her arms and I was so warm in her arms, I felt like life was running back into me in a flood and I knew she was a goddess and I’d been given to her and I was so happy. The chains were warm now too because she’d held them when she wrapped them around me. She told me she would chain me to the rock again soon but I was hers now and she would come back for me and unchain me whenever she wanted me and I knew I would be all right. I felt so warm and happy now and I was glad I’d been chained up to wait for her and I'd been given to her. That’s when I woke up. I can still feel how warm and alive she made me feel. It was the most amazing feeling.

I woke up in Caitie’s arms, handcuffed and chained to her bed by my leash and my leather bedtime collar. Caitie woke me up and held me and touched me and kissed me while I was waking up. She says I was trying to say something, I don’t know what now, and she was afraid I was having a bad dream, but it wasn’t a bad dream, it had some scary parts but it was a wonderful dream. Rachel was awake too, I was right between them and they both held me and told me it was all right now, and it was.

They unclipped my leash and they both held me and I told them all about my dream, what I could remember of it, and what I wrote here is just about everything I can remember. We’ve been talking a lot about collars on slaves and what they mean and what might be the right kind of collars for the slaves on the Island to wear, and I think my dream was about that. We know someone who was just sold and collared with a collar that can’t be taken off, it was locked on her permanently and she's very happy with it. It’s a beautiful collar and it’s made us all wonder if we could face that too and what it would be like and would it be good for us. I think my dream was my heart or my mind kind of working some of that out for me.

I think it means that something that’s locked around me permanently and something that only Caitie can take off me are really the same thing for me. Whatever Caitie wants me to wear for her as my collar I would never take off by myself. I couldn't do it and nobody else could either, so if Caitie puts it on me it’s the same thing to me as wearing a heavy iron chain that’s hammered shut. And even if she put a chain around my throat and hammered it shut so I could never take it off, and I would wear that chain proudly for you Caitie, you know I would, if Caitie ever wanted that chain to open it would open. Because she’s my goddess from the sea and I was given to her chained to a rock and only she has the power to chain me or set me free. No one else will ever have that power. I think that’s what my dream last night means.

Eva

 

 

Thank you for what you did for me last night and for Caitie. You did a beautiful and important thing for me. I love you so much. This will make me a better slave for Caitie and for you, I know it will. You explained to me why you had to punish Caitie, and what she’d done wrong and why, and what would happen to her and what would happen afterwards. The way you explained it made everything so clear to me and full of love. I was crying so hard when you hung Caitie up next to Stella for you and Lucia to cane them as their punishment, and I didn’t think I could stand to see any of this happen it was so awful, I felt like I was going to be sick. I’m so sorry you had to stop and take care of me but it was so important to me what you told me and the way you held me what you said and what I saw in your eyes. You were crying too and you let me kiss your tears away for you and you helped me so much. Thank you thank you thank you Rachel.

I begged you to let me take Caitie’s place remember and take her caning for her and you wouldn’t let me. You explained it to me for like the thousandth time and I understand it now but I didn’t understand it then until I saw it happening. Now I understand why. The punishment isn’t just to torture the slave and make her scream and cry pretty for the camera the way it was for us when Elise and I were doing porn in LA because I knew how that worked, but you wouldn’t let me do that because this isn’t like that, this is about love.

It’s to make the slave understand and learn and be better so the love between her and her Owner can flow feely and not be blocked by what she did wrong. It’s the doing wrong that gets in the way of that flow of love and holds it back, so the slave has to take her own punishment to break that block and no one can take it for her. It’s to wash away all the sin and all the shame of her doing wrong and wash it all away with her pain and her tears, so she can be forgiven by her Owner and start over and be clean and new and keep the love flowing. Like absolution. So the punishment is a kind of love too and if the love wasn’t there the punishment would be for nothing or less than nothing or just to torture her to make her scream just for fun and that doesn't mean anything or help anything. After I saw it and felt it now I understand why you wouldn’t let me take Caitie’s place and take the caning for her and I thank you for that too, Rachel.

But you let me do something very important for me and Caitie. You let me share it, not take her place but share it with her. You told me to hold Caitie while you were caning her. Just hold her as tight as I could and I did, I held her as tight as tight as I could and let her cry and cry right into my face and my breasts and I was crying too and kissing her tears away and loving her as hard as I could. Thank you for letting me do that. It was the sweetest and most beautiful thing for both of us that you let me do this for her, and that Lucia let Annie do the same thing for Stella while Lucia was caning her and this mattered so much to me, it made it all so much better and I think I made it better for Caitie too. She says I did. I would do anything for her and you let me do as much as you thought it was right for me to do. You let me take some of the pain right from her body by letting me hold her and I will always be so grateful you let me do that for Caitie.

It matters so much to me that I could take some of her pain and fear away by just holding her and feeling the cane hitting her and feeling it go right through her into me. Thank you. It was so hard to take it but I could actually feel it! I could feel the pain washing away the shame and the love flooding away the pain. Now I know how this works when slaves have to be punished here. I’m not afraid of it anymore and I guess that’s the best gift you and Caitie gave me last night. And I’m so proud I could give Caitie what you let me give her when she needed me and share what she was feeling. I'm so proud to be here and be part of this with you. Thank you, Rachel.

Eva

My good and faithful friend Lohr at

fort_kanji  struck me with this meme, so Caitlin strikes back.

 

1. What was the last book you received as a gift? What did you think of it?

Spunk and Bite: A writer’s guide to bold contemporary style. It’s a non-boring style guide. I have lots of boring ones too. English major, what can I say? This one is like a slightly punky postmodern reworking of Strunk and White’s Elements of Style. My dad picked it up for me at random because he knows I like style guides and he said the title reminded him of me. Thanks, Dad. Actually I like it a lot, but it could be a little spunkier and bitier.

2. What's the last book you gave as a gift? What made you choose it for the particular recipient?

I’m always giving people books, I don’t even remember the very last one. I just bought some books for Eva, but the last book I had to really search hard for to give someone: I found Stella a perfect first edition of John de St Jorre’s out of print Venus Bound, a history of the Olympia Press. I gave it to her for her birthday this year because she’s our resident Story of O scholar and she will instantly read anything that contains the magic words story and of and o in the correct order. She loved it and read it twice. I finally made her give it back to me so I could read it myself and now Rachel’s reading it. I’ve only read the Story of O parts so far.

3. What's your favourite album of the year (so far)? Why do you like it?

Aimee Mann’s new CD, @#%&*! Smilers. It’s dark and moody and brilliant and yet it’s catchy and perky and makes great dancing in the kitchen and driving in the car music. My favorite track: “Little Tornado,” which I have played continuously for days and days, driving everyone here crazy except Eva, who loves it exactly as much as I do.

4. What's been your favourite film (so far) of the year? Why?

The Fall. The most brilliant and moving film I’ve seen in a couple of years. I love everything about it, especially the little girl at the heart of it. Runners-up: Roman de Gare. Miss Pettigrew Lives For a Day. We saw all three of those twice.

5. Do you save letters and postcards from friends/lovers? For how long?

Yes. Forever. Even letters from lovers whom I now hate and would never willingly speak to again. I might never reread them, but I would never throw them away. No matter who wrote them, those letters are reflections of who I was at the time, or who someone thought I was. It would be like throwing away little parts of me. I can understand wanting to do that, there are parts of me that deserve throwing away, but I don’t think I ever would.

6. What are the five books you can't ever imagine not having on your shelves?

Only five?! Here’s ten: Alice in Wonderland. The Wind in the Willows. The Enchanted April. Story of O. The Lottery. Ulysses. Moby-Dick. The Nine Tailors. The Little Prince. Wuthering Heights. And let’s throw in a complete Shakespeare, a complete John Donne, a complete Borges, the Oxford Book of Sonnets and the OED. Just for a start.

7. What are the books you read five years ago that you still remember as somehow special?

None. Five years ago I graduated from college, left town for the East Coast, hated it, got an English majorish job in publishing, hated it, tried to finish writing a bad novel, hated it, read a lot of crap for my job, hated all of it. I don’t remember reading anything at that time that I liked, and I didn’t have time to read anything just because I wanted to read it. I don’t really even remember what I read that year. It was a bad year for me.

8. What are the books you read five years ago that you most wish you hadn't wasted your time on?

All of them, it seems.

9. What's one book you were assigned for a class that became a personal favourite?

On the Road. It’s a truly awful book, badly written, badly conceived, chaotic and repetitive and almost pointless and laughably hard to follow, and it ruined Kerouac's life. And yet it's a sort of accidentally brilliant mess that makes you want to steal an old car and a bottle of whiskey and hit the road yourself. It's a bad novel as a novel, but it's a compelling book that's bigger than just a book, it captures a whole era that probably looks like more fun than it really was because I wasn't alive then to have to live through it. It kind of works in spite of how bad it is, because it makes you want to feel the same things it feels. It makes you want to feel everything and do everything and go everywhere and never come back, at least till the money and the booze run out. I've read it three times now, the last time it was more fun to read now that it's less confusing, but it never really gets any better, and I still like it. And the original scroll draft is even worse.

10. What are the books that opened up the world to you or made you want to do new and different things with your life?

Every good book does that. Here’s the first book I ever read that did that: Tom Sawyer. When I was ten years old. And Huck Finn, although I always liked Tom better. Some others: The White Nile. The Blue Nile. The Man Who Walked Through Time. On the Road. Moby-Dick. The Odyssey (the Fitzgerald translation). Out of the Silent Planet.

11. What's the one book you'd give a lover to represent yourself and how you feel about them?

Last year Stella and Lucia gave Rachel and me their copy of the James Burge biography, Heloise & Abelard. Rachel and I read it aloud to each other in bed. It took us more than two weeks to read it, we could barely read five or six pages at a time without choking up and dissolving in tears and crying in each other’s arms the rest of the night. It was just comical some nights, we would open the book and we’d both start crying before we could read a word and then we’d just laugh at each other till we were sick. When we finally finished it, the pages looked like we’d been reading it in the tub. I bought Rachel a fresh copy and she cried when I gave it to her. We don’t dare actually open the damned book, we’ll be weeping for weeks. She knows I love her the way Heloise loved Abelard, and by the way, Abelard was something of a jerk and he didn’t really deserve that kind of love. But Rachel does.

12. What's the one thing that surprises you most about the way your tastes in books or music have evolved over the last few years?

My taste in books used to be much darker, much more bitter and cynical and sarcastic and cruel, and I used to read a lot of current literary fiction, because I was writing current literary fiction. Now I’m too happy to write the bitter cynical crap I used to write and I can barely stand to read current literary fiction unless it’s not very much like current literary fiction, like say Steven Millhauser, whom I love. I want to see a lot more sunshine in what I read now. The best thing I’ve read all year is The Enchanted April by Elizabeth von Arnim from 1921, a book that’s made of pure sunshine and wisteria. In music, though, the darker the better, but these days I need it to be streaked with a little light. See Aimee Mann’s “Little Tornado.” There are powerful forces afoot in my life seeking to let more light into my dark places. See Rachel and Eva.

Caitie

 

 

 

I have fallen in love with the sweetest, smartest, bravest, funniest, most loving girl in the whole world and I want everyone to know! I love you, Caitie. I’m with Annie all day today and Caitie is at work today and the Duty Roster says I’m on Liberty right after lunch and Annie said I should use this Liberty hour to write down what I’ve been talking about with her all morning so Caitie could read it here even if I said it all wrong and so I am. Hi Mistress, it’s me, your slave, Eva! My Mistress Caitlin’s heart is the deepest and strongest and most beautiful heart in the world and she is taking me into all the strange places inside it even the dark places and I am taking her into mine and mine is wide open to her, wide wide wide open. All the light and dark places. There are dark places inside Caitie where all I want to do for the rest of my life is live inside her and light her up inside like a candle inside her heart and make those dark places warm and light with my love. See Annie and Stella too, I told you I knew how to say that exactly right! Isn’t that exactly what it feels like?

My Owner, Caitlin, is the woman everything in my life has been pointing me toward and making me ready to belong to and to make her happy and maybe even made me a little tiny bit worthy of being with her, and that includes Elise. Being with Elise made this possible and I loved Elise with all my heart and Elise made me what I am today and what I am today is Caitie’s slave and property and lover and I love her beyond any love I ever had inside me to give anyone before, even to Elise. I’m sorry, Elise, but you know this is true and it had to happen this way and you made this happen and it’s you being a part of it that makes it all right for me to say this. I’m so sorry about the way this happened but I’m so happy too. I am so happy that if all I did here was type the word HAPPY all day and all night I wouldn’t be able to type enough HAPPYS to tell you how happy I am.

I feel like I slipped and fell into heaven. I fell into the most amazingly beautiful and loving bunch of people I have ever met. They’re not like anyone in the world I ever met before except Elise. I want to be part of them and belong to Caitie and Rachel for the rest of my life and all I want to do is make them happy and be worthy of being here with them because I have never been so happy and loved and safe and wanted. Really really wanted. I need to say some things about how I got here. Annie says I should, she understands how I feel and she says if it worries me I should try to get it out. I don’t want people to not understand and think maybe I’ve been coerced or manipulated into something that’s brand new to me and maybe I don’t know what I’m getting into becoming Caitie’s slave and becoming part of the Island and maybe I’m getting in over my head. So okay that part is true, I am in way over my head, I slipped and fell in the tub of love! (Caitie and Rachel and I watched the movie and oh my god is it like that here, it is totally like that, just a tub of love.)

Or maybe people will think I’m some kind of opportunist gold digger fortune hunter bitch and I just grabbed onto Caitie when I was drowning to escape what was going wrong in my old life. Caitie and Rachel and the Island really did save me and rescue me from things I was having a really hard time handling and if they hadn’t been there to save me I don’t know what I would have done but I would have done something and I would have survived somehow. Elise taught me how to do whatever I had to do to survive. But I think now even if I survived I would have wasted my life completely after Elise died if I hadn’t found Caitie and if Elise hadn’t given me to her and if Caitie hadn’t wanted me and if we hadn’t fallen in love and the others wanted me too. Loving her and becoming hers, this is the very best thing I’ve ever ever done in my whole life and this is what I was meant to do and if I can be that one little candle that lights her up inside that’s all I ever need to be.

Caitie is my Owner now and for always, but I’ve been owned before. This isn’t so totally new to me because I belonged to Elise, the only thing was that we mostly had to pretend that I didn’t. It was like a secret we were trying to keep from each other, even though we both knew. Or like a game. We had to pretend to each other that I was just along for the ride and I could leave her anytime and go off and do something else if I wanted to whenever I wanted to even though we both knew it wasnt true. We had to pretend we were both so independent and free and it was killing me sometimes that she couldn’t take from me as much as I wanted to give her. I wanted to belong to Elise totally. Right from the start. Right from when I fell in love with her. She was the first girl I ever felt that way about and I wanted her to feel like she owned me, I wanted to give myself to her and be her slave. It really embarrassed her, at first. She didn’t understand this at first, or she pretended she didn’t. The first time I ever tried to tell her the way I felt about this she laughed at me. Not to hurt me or be cruel. She was never cruel to me, not really, not on purpose. She just thought it was funny. In bed at night or whenever we were playing or fucking I was forever telling her I loved her and I wanted to belong to her and be hers forever and she just laughed. She would tell me she couldn’t own anyone or take care of anyone, she’d never even owned a cat! She said she couldn’t keep a potted plant alive for a week and I wanted to belong to her? She just laughed at me.

It made me cry sometimes that Elise couldn’t take me seriously that way at first. It was really hard for me to tell her those things, at first. It made me feel like she didn’t love me enough, not as much as I loved her. She didn’t, not at first, and I wasn’t her only girlfriend, not for a long time, I was just the only one who stuck to her like glue because I loved her more than any of them did but then when we left New York it was finally just me and her and it was wonderful. She didn’t love me as much as I loved her at first, but later she did. Much later she said I was her girl and her only love and I belonged to her and no one would ever take me away from her and that was all I wanted to hear all along but mostly we had to pretend that I was just along for the ride, it was too much responsibility for her if we said otherwise even though she took really good care of me. Better than any cat, so maybe I was the kitty she never had.

Sometimes I would tell her about how I felt sometimes growing up and knowing I was different and a lesbian and not really knowing what that meant yet and not knowing anyone like me and thinking no one would ever love me the way I wanted to be loved. I told her it felt like there was an empty space inside me, a bottomless place, just a black nothingness inside me in the shape of someone I hadn’t met yet, until I met Elise. But I told her I always knew I could really love someone if I found the right someone and if she would let me love her. Because I knew I wasn’t really empty inside because inside that emptiness I could hear someone crying and it was me. Telling her this kind of stuff made her laugh too, at first, and sometimes I would tell her these things just to make her laugh. It made everything better when I made her laugh, even if it hurt me to tell her something. Making her laugh and making her love me and want me around, that was all I wanted.

She told me when I talked like that about empty spaces inside me full of tears it was almost poetry. She said it was like sad, bitter, bad teenage poetry but she said it was beautiful and it reminded her of someone she used to know, someone she used to love back in high school, someone named Caitie. She said I reminded her a lot of Caitie except I was completely different from Caitie and I had no idea what she was talking about until I met Caitie. But that was a long time later. She never stopped loving Caitie and that was part of why she was afraid of loving me and taking care of me at first, she was afraid she couldn’t love me enough and it wouldn’t be fair to me because of how much she still loved Caitie, she didn’t have to say any of this, I could tell.

Here’s something that will tell you something about how Elise still loved Caitie and never forgot her. Long ago when Elise and I were first together and before I ever met Caitie or even started to hear stories about her, back when Elise I figured out was pretty sure she would never see Caitie again, she told me if anything ever happened to her and I needed help or if I was in trouble or hurt or I needed help for me and couldn’t reach Elise, I should call this friend of hers from high school named Caitlin. She made me memorize her cell number. I never even heard of this Caitlin person and Elise made me memorize her number if I needed help! Not her mom, not our modeling agent, not our friends, not anybody around us. Caitie. She would bug me with it. She would ask me sometimes out of nowhere what Caitie’s phone number was and I would have to remember it and recite it for her and I would get so mad and go YOU call her! Just fucking call her! I don’t even know this chick and you never even talk to her Elise but you obviously want to talk to her again so just call her! Why do I have to know this chick’s number if you say you’re probably never going to see her again?! But then we met Caitie and Rachel and it all started to make sense. And then one night I really did need help and I really needed to call Caitie and I remembered her number and I guess that was why Elise made me learn it. She knew somehow I would need it.

I have to back up a little. After we got to Alaska and it was just us Elise said she always understood what I meant when I told her I wanted to be her property and I was and she wanted me to be. She never told me I was her slave though, she didn’t even like that word, she wouldn’t even let me say it and she kind of hated it when I turned out to be good at what we were doing on camera in LA. She loved it but she hated it too. I knew a lot about it by then, I read some of the books and we read some of them together and I was acting out for the camera all the things I wanted to be for her and we even knew some people who were living that way or said they were, but she always said it was crazy and it was just another scene and people couldn’t really live like that But I wanted it.

But finally in Alaska she was finally telling me I was hers and I belonged to her and never to forget it! She never owned a cat but she owned me! As much of me as she would let herself and I wanted to give her more but she wouldn’t take everything I could give, she wouldn’t go there with me, but it was all right, I was with her and she loved me. She took care of me and took me away from New York when things got bad for us there and she took me to Miami and then LA and things got much worse there in some ways but in other ways better, because now it was just sort of us against the world. She protected me from as much as she could and she always made sure I was safe and okay with what we were doing. She was my guardian angel and I was hers but we needed more than just us I guess.

Then we made our big escape to Alaska. That was supposed to be our last big escape and a whole new life and it was great for a while and it was wonderful for Elise, she was really happy there for a while and she was so proud of our place there and how well we were doing there when Caitie and Rachel came to see us, she was so happy that they could all be friends again, but then things started again, slowly at first but later it got bad again, and we didn’t really escape anything after all, like the drugs. It followed us and it was there wherever we went and we never could really escape it and she wanted it too much and it killed her. She saved me from as much of the bad stuff as she could but she couldn’t save herself and I couldn’t either and I will always always always be sorry. Elise I’m so sorry. I miss you.

Back to now. I was meant to be here. That’s all I was trying to say, I guess, Mistress. I belonged to someone I loved before but we never got all the way there, wherever it was we were trying to go and then it had to end. I belonged to someone who loved Caitie more than Caitie ever knew. She told me if I ever needed help to call Caitie. When she went away for good she came back and gave me to Caitie, maybe just for Caitie to take care of for awhile, but she knew I would fall in love with Caitie. She knew Caitie would love me, I think she did know that, or she figured that Caitie had loved her so Caitie could maybe love me too and she was hoping. She was putting us together and letting us do the rest, it was the last thing she ever did and she wanted it to happen and it did. I fell in love with Caitie on the phone during the summer, all those nights on the phone talking and talking and talking. I fell in love with her so hard and so aching and so bad even before we figured out what Elise was trying to say to us and before I ever dared to tell her I was falling in love with her and before she and Rachel ever came back to Alaska to try to help me and when I finally told her face to face and she told me she loved me too and she wanted me to come home with her and we would figure out the rest of it later it was the happiest moment of my entire life, except for the moment when she put her collar around me and made me her slave.

I fell in love with her and she fell in love with me and Rachel and the Island said we could and they wanted us to and so here I am. This is where I was meant to be. Thank you, Caitie, I’m yours now and that’s all I ever want to be. Let me be your candle to light up the dark places for you.

Your Eva

 

 

“Funeral, wedding, or party?” The guy I call The O’Neill was shouting happily at me on the phone from a bar. He’s not really The O’Neill, but we call him that sometimes and it makes him happy. He’ll do till a better O’Neill comes along, and there couldn’t be a better one. He was shouting over the noise of the bar. I heard Irish music and someone laughing and someone else calling for him to come and play. I knew which bar he was in. It was the same bar Rachel and I and the rest of the Island had been partying in last St. Patrick’s Day when Eva called me from Alaska and told me Lizzie—Elise—had died. The O’Neill is the bagpiper I asked to play at her funeral. He’s an old pal of my dad’s and mine, and in Irish bars he usually just plays the tin whistle, but he’s a great piper too, he plays at weddings and funerals and parties and parades. I was calling him to pipe for us again. “What’s it to be?” he asked.

“A bit of all three,” I said, “in that order.”

“I can do that,” The O’Neill said. “And would you be wanting the Scottish or the Irish?”

“The works,” I said. “Everything from ‘The Parting Glass’ to ‘Maire’s Wedding’ and back again. There are just a few things we have to have and you can wing the rest. It’ll be Sunday, after Mass. How long can you play?”

“I can play a damn sight longer than you can stay on your feet and dance, Miss Caitlin!” he shouted. I laughed again. “I can pipe you right into the ground! I can pipe you right under the table!”

“Just pipe your heart out, O’Neill,” I said, “and we’ll see who ends up under whose table.”

“Ah, now you’re just toying with me, Caitie! I know I haven’t a ghost of a chance of getting under anybody’s table with you, girl. But I’ll pipe for you anyway.”

The O’Neill was waiting there for us at the cemetery Sunday morning, wearing his full Highland kit and kilt and Scottish regimental regalia, even though he’s an Irish ex-cop from west Denver. He was standing very still at parade rest beside Elise’s grave. He remembered the place well, he didn’t need the cemetery map. Elise is buried in a shady spot among the trees, where she’ll be covered by the leaves in the fall. She loved to walk in the autumn leaves, and soon they’ll be falling for her. Falling on her, falling all around her. It’s a beautiful place, Rachel and I picked it out for her ourselves when her parents couldn’t seem to deal with it. Her folks didn’t have a family plot here when Elise died in Alaska in March and they weren’t really capable of making the arrangements. They were too struck with grief and the shock of losing her. We found a place for her in the big old cemetery where our family plots are, most of us, Rachel’s family and mine and Lucia and Stella’s families. And now Elise.

No one said a word. When we were all assembled in a circle around the place in the grass where we buried Elise, more than twenty of us including my baby sister Ciara and Maria’s baby Michael, The O’Neill marched a few paces away and played “The Parting Glass” for us. Slowly and softly. It was the last air he’d played at Elise’s funeral in March. Oh God. It broke my heart to hear him play it again, even though I’d asked him for it and I was braced for it. Eva wasn’t. She burst into tears at the first notes and she wrapped her arms around me and sobbed into my shoulder. We just held each other and cried while the piper played on, with Rachel’s arms wrapped tightly around both of us.

After he let “The Parting Glass” die away, he marched off a little way between the graves to give us all some distance from the music, and he kept playing softly while the group split up. “The Mist-Covered Mountains,” “The Flowers of the Forest,” “The Skye Boat Song,” “Dark Island,” “The Star of the County Down.” Rachel led everyone away for a few minutes so Eva and I could be alone with Elise. They had other visits to make there anyway: Maria’s best friend from high school is buried there, Lucia’s baby sister Gabriela is there, my grandmother’s best friend who died last fall, other relatives and friends, all marked on the cemetery map. It was a beautiful cool sunny morning, with clouds streaming across the sun. It was almost noon.

Eva and I had things to tell Elise that no one else but Rachel will ever hear, and I won’t tell those things here either. But the part I will tell is this: We told Elise we both loved her, we would always love her, and we were sorry she’d had to leave us. We told her we would never forget her and she would be with us always and we hoped she was at peace now with everything that had happened in her life. We told her she meant more to us than she could ever know. We’d visited her grave twice right after we came home from Alaska last month with Eva, and we’d told her all this and much more before, but now we had something else to tell her. Eva and I said all this together, or mostly together; it was sort of half memorized and half improvised and we cried and laughed our way through it. I’ll repeat part of it here.

Elise, this is Caitie and Eva. We’re together now. Thanks to you. Today, right here by your grave, we’re starting a new life together. We need your blessing, and we know you’ll give it to us. We belong to each other now, and to Rachel, and you started all this, you know. Thank you for bringing us together. We did the rest ourselves, and we’re pretty proud of ourselves. And you. We know you wanted us to be together after you left us, and we know you approve of us falling love. Too late to stop now anyway, baby, and this never would have happened if not for you. We love each other, and we love you too, and we know you’re with us today. We’ll take you with us in our hearts wherever we go. And wherever we go, we’ll be together, because of you. Thank you, Elise.

Five minutes till noon. Our piper played “Maire’s Wedding,” and that was the cue we’d set for all our friends to converge back to where we were sitting beside Elise’s headstone. Eva and I stood and faced each other, with our best friends and our lovers all in a circle around us, the Island in the inner circle, the Hexagon surrounding them, and I took Eva’s hands and looked into her eyes. Rachel and Lucia had handkerchiefs ready for when we started crying again, and we knew we were just about to cry, and why does that always make us laugh? I don’t know why, but we were laughing too. The O’Neill, far off among the trees on a little rise above the graves lying all around us, stretched out “Maire’s Wedding” just long enough and then he stopped when the chapel bells down the hill started striking noon. The bells were ringing and the sun was coming out from behind the clouds and the wind shook the leaves in the trees as we stood there on the grass and it was a perfect moment. Thanks, Elise, we took that perfect moment for your blessing on us, and thanks, God, sometimes your timing is right on. This is more or less what I said to Eva.

“Eva, I love you. I want you. I need you to be mine. I need you to be completely mine, your body and your soul, your heart and mind and spirit, every part of you. I need to give you so much, and I need you to give me everything you have to give too. To make you completely mine and to give you all the love I need to give you, I need to make you my slave. I now take command of you, Eva, and I demand you surrender to me. As your Owner I swear to love you and own you for as long as I live. I promise to love you, to lead you, to treasure you, to protect you and nurture you, to never harm you or let any harm come to you, to never leave you or send you away from me, but to keep you with me always. I promise to take all the love and service and devotion you can give me and ask for more. I promise to make our two lives one life and to try to make us as happy together as I possibly can, with your help as my slave. With this chain I claim you as my property, my slave, to be my slave for the rest of your life. Please kneel and take my collar and say you’ll be mine.”

Eva knelt before me and looked up right in my eyes and said yes yes yes. Yes! She said, all in a rush without choking up for even a moment, that she would be mine forever, she swore on her life that she would be my slave and my property and my lover and my friend and my partner and my servant and she would be mine and love me and serve me and be part of me until she died and even after that she would still be mine—and that’s where we both choked up and started sobbing again. Rachel and Lucia had to step in with their handkerchiefs and wipe our eyes for us, because Eva and I weren’t going to let go of each other’s hands, not for a second, not till this was done, and that’s when everyone started laughing, the ones who weren’t already crying, and most of us were doing both.

When we could speak again and Eva finished saying her vows, I asked her three times, “Will you swear on your life to be my slave?” and three times she answered, “Yes, I will be your slave.” I took a deep breath. Rachel took my hands from Eva’s and slipped something hard and cool into them. As Eva knelt before me and bowed her head, I fastened a gold choker necklace around her throat, just like the one I wear every day for Rachel as her slave, and I closed the little gold padlock, the one that says on the front: 

PLEASE RETURN TO
TIFFANY & CO.
NEW YORK

But on the back Eva’s padlock is engraved: 

IF LOST
PLEASE RETURN TO CAITLIN
FOREVER

I think I said something like, “Eva, you’re mine, you’re really mine now,” and at the very same moment Eva was saying something like, “Caitie, we did it, we really did it, I’m yours!” and she was leaping up into my arms and kissing me and then I don’t know what we all said or did for a few minutes, it’s all a blur. The piper started playing again, “Brian Boru’s March” and “Highland Cathedral” and “Amazing Grace” and "The Mist-Covered Mountains" again and more. Everyone all around us was hugging us and kissing us and I was dancing Eva around in a circle with Rachel and we were all squealing and dancing and jumping up and down and then we all sat and lay in the grass around Elise’s grave to hug and catch our breath and talk. I remembered to ask Rachel to help me be both the best slave to her and the best Owner to Eva I could possibly be and she promised she would and Rachel asked everyone there to pledge to help Caitie and Eva become the best slaves and the best Owner and slave they could be and to help us be strong and happy as a couple and as a triple and as a family. Everyone cheered and swore they would help us and be with us and keep us strong. Thank you, everyone.

Danny and Josh popped the corks on the two bottles of champagne we’d smuggled into the cemetery, against all the rules. We passed them around and drank straight from the bottles and sprayed champagne all over me and Eva and each other and Elise’s grave. Lucia had a couple of telegrams to read to us again from our friends in the UK who were popping corks in synchronization with ours and we toasted them all. Thank you, every one of you! Stella managed to get our friends Dante and Brunetto and their slaves in France on Lucia’s cell phone and we could hear them whooping for us clear across the Atlantic. And then it was time for us all to go home and celebrate.

As we passed around the last of the champagne and started to straggle away from Elise’s graveside, The O’Neill played “The Parting Glass” for us one last time. I waved to him and he bowed formally to me as he played on. I held Eva tight and we listened for the last sweet sad note and then it was over.

There were many other things for us to do together last Sunday. Some of them were surprises, to some people anyway, and some of them were not. There was another collar for another slave to kneel and accept from her Owner, and that moment was very similar to the one in the cemetery and also very different and it was a big surprise to the slave in question, and yet on the other hand it wasn’t a surprise at all. She knew this was going to happen and she was ready this time. But the tears were the same, just the same. Happy tears. 

Thank you, Eva, for being mine. Thank you, Rachel, none of this could ever have happened without your love and ownership and vision. Thank you for giving me your collar and taking me as yours, I'm so proud of being yours! Thank you to the Island and all our friends, and our piper. And thank you, Elise, for being there.

Caitie

 

My dearest dearest Mistress Caitlin,

This is your slave, Eva. I love saying that! Your slave Eva. I belong to you now, Mistress. I love you and you own me and I’ve been your slave for one whole day now! Though really you know I was already yours long before that. Now I’m your property and I’m wearing your collar and I’m your slave and I will belong to you for life. Thank you. Thank you for letting me call you Mistress Caitlin now and for letting me still call you Caitie sometimes and for showing me how to decide which one is right when and correcting me when I’m wrong and thank you most of all for loving me and liking me and wanting me to be part of your life. I am now, I’m part of your life. I’m yours. Your slave, Eva!

As your slave I will give you everything I have to give and I’ll try as hard as I possibly can. I swore to you yesterday in front of all our friends and the whole world and Elise too. I will be your slave and your lover and your servant and your friend and your partner and I will give you everything and hold nothing back and be yours forever and make my life part of your life, and with your permission Mistress I will repeat those words to you every day of my life and I will live by them and I will die by them and I will always always always be yours.

Mistress, please let me try to say again what I was trying to say to you last night. What I want to beg you to do is this. Please take everything from me. Take everything! I’ll give you everything I can, but if there’s some part of me that’s hard for me to give you and I’m having trouble giving it to you, please take it from me and please please please don’t be afraid to hurt me if you have to! Or if you want you. You hurting me doesn’t ever really hurt me no matter how much it hurts because it’s you hurting me. I still don’t think I figured out the right way to say that, but I know you know what I mean. And please punish me whenever I fall short of giving you what you want from me. You give me so much, you and Mistress Rachel give me everything too. If I fail you in anything I deserve to be punished and I’ll be better every time you punish me, I promise. I promise I will.

This is my first love letter to you as your slave! Your slave Eva! Isn’t this so amazing? Everything I do now is like a love letter to you forever. Okay okay I know you’re laughing at me right now, Mistress, and I love the way we make each other laugh, I’ve never laughed so much in my whole life as I do with you, but I mean it, you know I do, I mean it every word. Every breath, every beat of my heart, every drop of blood in my body. Everything I do and everything I am is a love letter to you.

All I want to do in my life is to make you happy and not disappoint you and make you proud of owning me. Thank you for making me yours. Thank you for enslaving me. Thank you for loving me and for wanting to own me. You’ve given me a whole new life. My new life is you.

I love you, Mistress Caitlin. I love you, Caitie. I love you.

Your slave, Eva

This is a fable. Not a fairy tale, because it’s true, and fables are truer than fairy tales, although I believe all fairy tales are true in some way. But this is my fable so I can call it whatever I want. It’s true because this is my life, not just a fable. This is the story of more than one life, and one other person in particular could tell a similar fable. She helped me write this by letting me talk it out to her before I wrote it down. When I told her this fable she laughed and said, Yes, that’s it exactly and I’ve been telling you this for years, why don’t you ever listen to me? Well, apparently I was listening, Lucia, even though my fingers were stuck in my ears, and thanks for listening to me, baby. Tell the world your own fable sometime. (I’ll help.)

My name is Rachel and this is my fable about how I became the queen. Once upon a time… No, that’s all wrong! I told you this isn’t a fairy tale, this is real life. A fabulous version of my real life. I’ll try to tell this fable the same way I told it to Lucia last night.

A young woman awoke one morning to discover that sometime during the night she had been crowned the queen of the world. Yes, queen. Of the whole world. All she had to do was to reach out and pick up the crown. In fact, the crown was already resting gently on her serenely untroubled brow. It was there when she awoke. She had only to seize the crown and seat it a little more firmly on her now suddenly regal head and then… rule. Take command. Seize the throne and wield the power. Be the Queen. It’s good to be the Queen. Isn't it? It’s all right there at her fingertips. And the only question that remained was this: Would she take the crown?

No, that version is still a little too fairy tale. Let’s start this fable the way I told it to Lucia last night, somewhere deep in the second bottle of wine. The way you’d tell it to someone if it had happened to you that very morning and you were still reeling from it.

Imagine you wake up one day and you’re the queen of the world! It’s all yours! All you have to do is take the crown! You never expected it, you never imagined it was even possible, but there it is and it’s yours for the taking. Would you take it? Why wouldn’t you? Wouldn’t anyone? Who wouldn’t want to be the queen? The queen of the whole world! …So why did I wait so long to pick it up and make it mine?

There’s a little more to this fable than that. Let’s fill in some of the blanks. This world in search of a queen is not the Planet Earth or the solar system or the Milky Way. This world is something much smaller. And much larger. If you take the crown—let’s say it was offered to you—only a handful of people would ever know you were the queen of your own little world. It’s small enough to take with you wherever you go. But it’s larger that the whole universe, and you’re pretty sure you’ll be happy to spend your whole life in this little world and never leave, except for vacations and royal visits to other worlds and so on, and you’ll never be bored with ruling over it.

It’s not an unfamiliar world to you either. Some crowned heads in somewhat similar situations I hear tales of have suddenly found themselves the rulers of strange new worlds they had only just discovered. But not me. The crown I was offered was the sovereignty of a world I knew very well. I had lived there, off and on, since I was very young, and I’d recently become a permanent resident there, but not the queen. The most wild and beautiful place in the universe. A world I would die for. It’s the place I love more than any other place on earth. Or elsewhere. It was the Planet Caitlin, until recently independent, very independent, self-governing, autonomous, free, and very proud of being free. An unconquerable and ungovernable world. Planet Caitlin had always been ruled by her own monarch, Queen Caitlin herself, and her one and only loyal but unruly subject, one Princess Caitlin, would abide no other ruler. Until now. Now there had been a revolution and there was a power vacuum at the very top. The rebellious Caitlinese masses seemed wary but willing. They would place themselves under new ownership if the right owner was interested. The crown was mine for the taking.

How and why I awoke one day to find this crown offered to me is another fable. This fable is about why I hesitated to take it. And why I finally did.

If you were suddenly offered the crown that would make you the queen of the world, would you take it? It’s a serious question. Many people think they would. I think most people in fact would not. If they did take it, they would soon want to give it back. Being the queen sounds like a lot of fun, a thrill ride every minute, but also a lot of work. A lot of responsibility. Not everyone is born to rule. Even us born rulers doubt our divine right sometimes. Even being Queen for a Day can be a daunting prospect. It’s a small world, Planet Caitlin is, but racked with dissension and rebellion, seething with inner conflict and outer turmoil. An unwary queen might easily lose her head. The candidate's gut said yes, but would she really have the heart to rule? And the need and the desire? And the might?

And would you really want to rule over someone as her queen? Her absolute sovereign? Her mistress? Her owner? The young woman in my fable, let's say she was me, had never sought such power over another human being. I had never wanted to own other human beings and make them my slaves and use them as the playthings of my royal desires. It hadn’t really occurred to me that I could. I lived in the midst of people I loved who very happily owned or were owned by other people I loved, and I was happy to benefit from the arrangement without quite being completely a part of it. It seemed almost accidental that I was there, but it wasn’t. We call this place the Island, and that’s another fable too.

The populace of Planet Caitlin and I debated endlessly the rightness or wrongness of what were living in the middle of. Without quite daring to admit how much we wanted it. I’d been reasonably content as the queen of my own little world. My world now lived in domestic bliss (more or less) in the same big house as this other little world I loved so much, the only thing I had ever really loved. Content, until very recently. I’m a lucky girl. I suppose I was already a princess in my own little world, and I had felt content to be a princess. Queens have to work much harder than princesses. I had always had more than my share of wealth and power and freedom. I had never felt powerless or deprived in any way. I had never craved absolute power over another and the right to take her freedom away from her in order to use that power. Until now.

When the crown was offered to me, I realized, it was because I had asked for it. Without quite realizing what I was asking for. All I had asked for was a way to give the woman I love more love. All of my love. I had more love to give her, but there was a barrier. Two barriers: Her freedom, and my hesitation to take command. I had asked her to find a way to give me more. To give me everything. The only way that we could see to do this was the way we saw all around us. It was working all around us. There was love all around us too. We didn’t think that was a coincidence. Is anything ever a coincidence? We were even helping spread the word across the galaxy, to other planets, from our tiny but growing Island. Would it work for us too?

More and more I was allowed to borrow the crown and play Queen for a Day. More and more our two little worlds became one world. More and more I hesitated before giving it back. I’d never wanted anything in the world so much as I wanted that crown. When the crown was finally offered to me, I was reaching for it at the same moment. I took her and she surrendered. I became the queen, she became my slave. We got lucky the way it turned out, there might have been bloodshed, a war between the worlds. No, that’s the wrong fable! I wouldn’t have taken the crown if she hadn’t given it to me freely, and taken my collar in exchange. And Caitie didn’t offer it to me until she was sure I was ready to take it.

But she’s not getting it back! I’m the queen around here now and I rule. It’s also a bigger little world than I expected it to be. Two slaves, one mistress. I don’t even insist on being called the queen or Her Majesty. Not all the time. We all know who’s in charge here now. Just look for the crown. It’s usually rolling around under the bed somewhere. Under my side of the bed.

Rachel

 

 

Eva is changing everything in my life. No, that’s not true, she’s not changing everything. Rachel, the Island, our family, those things are strong and steady and true and they’re bringing Eva into them and making a place for her. We’re changing Eva too, and even more soon. Eva is transforming my life and enlarging it and making it shine twice as bright. She’s changing so many things. She’s changing this blog too. It’s a small thing, this blog, the tiniest blip of a blog in the blogosphere, but it’s mine own. Until today.

Eva wrote something wonderful for me here yesterday. I cried when I read it, I cry every time I reread it, I think I’d better stop reading it before I get dehydrated and have to go home and jump in the pool with Eva. The night before, she told me she was going to write me a love letter for me to read later. She was so excited about it, she said she couldn’t wait to surprise me with it so she was telling me in advance so I would watch out for it. Eva, you’re adorable! You keep surprising me, even when you tell me, Heads up I’m about to surprise you! I thought it would turn out to be a note hidden under my pillow and I couldn’t wait to see it and I thought what I think every minute of every day, that this is the sweetest girl in the world. But she wrote it here, on my own blog, with a little secret password and LJ help from my unbelievably loving Rachel and the girls. What she wrote is so sweet and so perfect I told her it isn’t just my blog anymore. I want to share it with her and Rachel.

This life of mine isn’t just my life anymore. Our three lives are becoming one life. I lived my one single selfish lonely life all for myself for a little too long and I never want to live my life just for myself again. Besides, I can’t. I don’t belong to myself anymore. I belong to Rachel, Eva belongs to me, I belong to both of them and the Island, and we all belong to each other. It suddenly seemed wrong and obsolete and a thing of the past to keep this blog all to myself too. So this blog will become a shared blog for the three of us. We’ll build some new icons for each of us soon so who’s writing what might be a little less confusing. Less confusing for us, anyway. I updated the profile page too, and it will probably change again soon when Rachel and Eva decide what they want to say about themselves there. And maybe they’ll change it completely, and the whole look of the thing too. I hope they do. This blog is not just about me anymore.

Rachel has never wanted to share this blog with me before. She’s always said my blog should be just for me, a place for me to say whatever I want about whatever I want without anyone interfering with what I want to talk about. But that was before she owned me. I'm not free anymore. I don't want to be free anymore. It isn't even my choice not to be free anymore, I'm her slave and I couldn't change that if I wanted to. And I don't want to. So my tiny little blog is her property too, and every change I've just made in it was with her approval and permission. Everything is different now, and this blog has been very slow to catch up with how our lives have changed. Rachel says she wants this tiny piece of it to change too and she knows what she wants to say here and she’ll start writing it here soon. Eva has never had a blog before, she hasn’t even been on the web very much since college. Elise handled all their email. She didn’t even have an active email account of her own until I set one up for her this summer just so we could pass notes to each other. She says she’s thrilled that I want her to be a part of this, as long as I don’t mind if she just writes me the same love letter over and over because she says she doesn’t know what else she could possibly write for me.  

Eva, I don’t mind. Please write me a love letter every day. The same letter every day for as long as we live and maybe a little longer, and every new day we spend together we’ll make that day a new love letter. You don’t even need words. You don’t need to write it down. You can write me a love letter with your eyes and your lips and your body and your heart. Most of all your heart. I know what’s written in your heart, and you know what’s written in mine. That’s all the love letter I need. But now that you know the password, this blog is yours too.

 

 

Dearest dearest dearest Caitie,

Surprise! This is a letter for you from me. Rachel gave me your password. I know I told you this would be a surprise for you but really it won’t be I know. Because I ruined the surprise and told you I might do this because I couldn’t wait to tell you. But I want to do it anyway because I have to tell you something all over again. I’m here with Annie right now and she helped me pick out the song for this and she’s helping me just by being here but I made her promise not to make me laugh so hard I can’t write! I called Stella too to see if she thought this was way crazy to do this and would she help me say something the right way and Stella was all Yes it’s crazy and I love it so let’s do it! So she helped me too. And Rachel said she would come back and look at it for me and I asked her to check my spelling and help me post it when I’m done, but every word here is mine and every word is for you.

Caitie, I love you. Because I love you so much I have to tell you something important about me. I know you know everything important there is to know about me. You know the very very worst about me. There’s almost nothing you don’t know about me now. Maybe what color my mother’s eyes were, did I tell you that? They were green almost like yours but almost golden sometimes too when the sun was just right. You even know everything I want to tell you here but I told you I wanted to write it down for you so you could read it and here it is. I want to tell you the very best thing there is about me. The only really good thing. So you’ll know what you’re getting now that I’m yours and you’ll know why it will be all right for us. I know you know but I have to tell you this.

This is the worst. I don’t have anything to give you except me. I’m not very good at lots of things. I failed and failed at so many things I tried to do. Maybe I didn’t try to do the right things before but I always tried really hard. I did some bad things and you know all about that. The only thing I ever dreamed about doing that I was pretty good at up till now was modeling and that ended up being really bad for me and for Elise. It turned into all sorts of bad things for us but we both really tried. And scooping ice cream. I was pretty good at scooping ice cream for my aunt and uncle summers in their ice cream shop back in Vermont when I was a kid. But if I never see another double scoop of Cherry Garcia or Phish Food it’ll be okay and I can’t go back there and scoop ice cream for them anymore anyway and I would never even want to because now I belong to you and I will be with you. But I will scoop ice cream for you if you want me to, Caitie, I’ll even be your ice cream cone for you! I told this to Rachel and she says she’ll make sure this happens maybe tonight so baby I’ll be your sugarcone tonight!

But I want to tell you the very best thing there is about me. There’s one thing I can do, Caitie. This is the only thing I can really give you. There’s only one thing I’m really good at. I can really love. I really really love you. I know how to do that. I can’t help doing it anyway because I love you. I really loved Elise too and I gave her everything I could, I gave her all my heart, it’s the one thing I know how to do, the best thing I know how to do. And I really love you. I love you with all my heart Caitie. I love you just as much as I ever loved Elise and even more even more even more! I know this is all right with Elise too because she gave me to you and I told her I was going to love you even more and she knows. She loved both of us and she wanted us to be together and it’s all right. And anyway we can’t help it can we, we can’t help it. We want to do this for us! Not for her. We have to. And I know you love me too and I know how much and I know there’s room in the very center of you for me and in the very center of me there’s nothing but you. I know there will be enough love for all of us and more than enough.

You know what Rachel told me in bed the other night while you were still in the tub with Annie and Stella? She said Caitie worrying about whether she has enough love to give is like the sun worrying about having enough sunshine! Rachel said sometimes Caitie you have cloudy days like we all do and sometimes it rains and it gets dark, and when it rains Rachel and I will just love you even more to make the sun come out again for you. Rachel says with both of us loving you when the sun comes out it will be twice as bright. Is that a great thing to say? It’s so true! With both of us to love you the sun will be twice as bright! Rachel knows how much love you have inside you and I do too and it’s like sunshine filling up the whole world for me.

This is the silliest thing, Caitie I know it is, writing this to you on your own blog! Everyone will think this is weird and you can take it down after you read it, but Rachel said yes I should do it so it will always be here for you to look at if you want to. Thank you for saying I could and thank you Rachel. I keep telling you this Caitie, but maybe if I write it down in a letter so when it rains and the sun is in the clouds you can go back here and say look Eva loves me! She wrote me a love letter! And now the sun is shining! Caitie I think this is my very first love letter ever. It’s so perfect that it’s a love letter for you. To make the sun come out again whenever you need it. And I’ll be right there too in the sunshine.

I love you. There, that’s all I really had to say. I love you.

Eva

 

 

Can I really do this? Is my heart big enough? Can I really love one more person in my life? Can she really love me? Will it take my love away from the other people I love? Can we really do this together? Am I asking too much?

Who do I love? I love Rachel. She’s the center of my world, the very center of all the spheres of my heaven. Love is not a big enough word. I worship her, I adore her, I belong to her. She owns me. She’s my life. All the other spheres of Paradise revolve around my love for Rachel. Lucia, Stella, Ronnie, Annie, Daniel, Joshua, the Island, that’s the innermost sphere. My baby sister Ciara and her Kelly. My father. Two girls who are gone, Elise and Gabriela, I still love them both, in very different ways. My mother and my other two sisters. (I may not like them much sometimes, but I love them. Yeah, really I do.) My grandmother (the nice one, not the other one). The Hexagon, especially Bella and Natalie, but all of them. Dante and Francesca. Jack and Madeline. The rest of my family and all the Island's other families and friends and Aimee Mann. And now we’re at the limit of what I can call love and not stretch the word so far that it means nothing but a taste or a preference or an aesthetic choice. If we close off the circle where the word love stops meaning what I think I mean when I say I really love someone—that I would kill for them or die for them—we have to stop somewhere short of the end of that list. (All right, I'd kill for Aimee Mann too.) But now I’ve added one more to the innermost circle of the people I love: Eva.

I love Eva. She loves me. But am I really the right one to love her and try to make her life and my life into one life? I am the least likely candidate of all the people around me to be able to bring one more heart into my life. If this were Stella’s heart we were talking about, we wouldn’t even be talking about this. My girl Stella at stelladellasera has the biggest heart in the world. The more she opens it, the more love she has to give and the happier she is and the happier she makes everyone around her. Lucia is like that too, and Rachel, the Rachel at the center of my world. If Ronnie and Annie hadn’t been able to open their hearts to us, the Island wouldn’t be here. Stella’s brother Danny’s heart is so much like Stella’s, and Josh is just like his Master. My baby sister is an angel in the shape of a girl, and Kelly is her twin. And Eva’s love and openness and eagerness to give have amazed us all over and over and she is more like Stella in this way than anyone else I’ve ever known. Eva has so much heart.

And then there’s me. My heart used to be locked in a strongbox inside a bank vault. Inside a tomb. Buried beneath a mountain. And inside that was just the key to the real strongbox. Years ago when I realized I couldn’t be with the one I loved, the one I loved far beyond everyone and everything else in the world that I loved, I locked it away. I used the lure of my locked-away love as a weapon and I hurt a hundred people I didn’t care about. I promised to marry a man I didn’t love and I thought it didn’t even matter. He didn’t seem to care, he didn’t even notice I didn’t love him, he was happy, so what good is love? Fuck love, I thought, love has only ever brought me pain, and when I try to love other people it only hurts them too. Rachel, Stella, Lucia, Elise, a couple of others, I hurt them all, because I loved them or because I couldn’t love them enough. So I walled away my useless wasted poisonous heart and tried to stop caring. Fuck love--but love to fuck. Until it all fell apart and Rachel took me back and opened me up to love again. And saved my life.

But even now: Ask anyone on the Island who’s the single one of us most likely to be able to give her heart and love to someone new and they would say Stella. Ask anyone here who’s the one most likely to fuck you and then murder you in your sleep and bury you in the backyard and they’d say: Caitie. Okay, I’m kidding! I wouldn’t dig up the yard without Rachel’s permission, but still, that is what they’d say.

But everything has changed. It changed last year because Rachel fell in love with me all over again and she opened up my heart and that was the beginning of everything good in my life now. It changed because the Island happened and changed all our lives forever. It changed because Rachel said if we didn’t go see Lizzie when we had the chance in Alaska and something happened to her we’d never forgive ourselves, and we did go see her and it turned out to be our last chance. It changed because this spring a girl I once loved died and then she came back to give me a little blue fish. It changed because Eva finally figured out what Elise was trying to tell us, and I didn’t believe her until we went back to Alaska to save her and she was right and it all came true. But most of all everything has changed because Eva and I fell in love, fish or no fish. We made this come true because we wanted it, we wanted each other in our lives, no matter what the rest of it meant, and Rachel and the Island made it possible.

She says she knows it will work, she says she can see it in my eyes when I look at her, and I can see it in hers too. It will work, because of her, but then there’s me: Will my heart be big enough? Eva is making me the center of her world, and I’m helping her do it and soon she won’t have any choice, she’s part of the Island now and I’ll be taking her over as my property and she’ll be mine. She says I’m already the center of her world and whatever I do with her will be whatever happens to her and it will be right for her because it’s what I want and whatever I want is what she wants. But she deserves to be at the center of my heart too, that’s how slavery works here on the Island, it’s not just a way to use human beings as property for your own pleasure (okay, it’s that too), it’s a way to give more love and take more love, a way to give and take everything, a way to make two lives into one. It’s the best way we’ve ever found, it’s the way ahead for us. Eva will be part of my heart, she already is and she deserves to be in the very center, but Rachel is already there and always will be there and I will have to become a bigger person than I’ve ever been before. I will have to find more love to give than I’ve ever found before. Eva deserves this. I want to give her everything I can give. She belongs to me. But I belong to someone too.

Eva says this will be easy and it won’t hurt a bit and we’ll show each other the way. But can I really do this? Is my heart big enough? Am I asking too much?