Crone Island

I storm into the living room, scoop the cat off of my fiancé’s lap and without saying a word, head back to the bedroom.

“Hey, where are you taking her?”

“We’re going to Crone Island.” I announce, imperiously and without explanation.

I slam the bedroom door.

I was first introduced to Crone Island when Kerry pointed me toward and article on Emotional Labor and its subsequent Meta Filter. Crone Island is a magical island filled with all of your best ladyfriends. There are whiskey rivers, weights without Bros monopolizing the squat rack, cats that like to snuggle, romance novel trees, and Buffy The Vampire Slayer Marathons.

And unicorns. Lots of unicorns.

In real life, Crone Island is located at the intersection of my best friend’s liquor cabinet and the sympathetic, exasperated noises a group of women can make when comforting a woman whose boyfriend has just accidentally called her fat. It’s the place where you go to forget (for a time) that you’re in a relationship and have to take someone else’s feelings into account.

That’s the more innocent part of Crone Island.

The truth is that it’s also a fortified city with genetically modified alligators in the moats and She Wolves prowling the parapets. It is an emotional retreat, the place I go to when I’m too angry or frustrated or tired to engage in my relationship(s) like a grownup. Crone Island is where I don’t have to do the emotional labor of being in a relationship.

I’ve spent a lot of time in this part of Crone Island.

Which is the part of my personality that I am ashamed of, that I hide from almost everyone. Okay. We all have our quirks that we hide and goodness knows I have a tendency to overshare. Awkward dancing? Here’s the playlist! The fiancé’s flexible relationship with time? Groused about to my best friend over Saturday brunch. The terrible fight we had three months ago? Collapse on closest couple’s couch accomplished. What I rarely discuss (and probably should) is the rapidity with which I can do disconnect from our lives and our relationship. It’s a throwback to exes who weren’t very good to me, to parts of my life where it was easier to be a Vulcan than a person.

While I know that this is No Way to Live and The Number One Thing You Can Do to Make Your Partner Hate You, I still do it. Frequently. Because there is still a vocal minority in my brain that believes it is easier to be alone.

Over the past months, that vocal minority has gotten a lot louder. I find myself in one of the most challenging and stressful moments in my life and my easiest coping mechanism is flight. Since January, I’ve changed depression medications, we’ve both changed jobs. We’re planning our wedding and fundraisers and have been generally pretty busy without a lot of time alone. For two introverts it was a recipe for bickering and hurt feelings, and I found myself gathering up an indignant cat and running off to Crone Island most nights of the week.

While I was snuggling the cat behind my mental fortifications, I would worry. Constantly. About how unfair I was being to the fiancé. About how he should be able to be with someone who could actually be with him. About how fucking scary it is to be in love and spend most of my time being in love and vulnerable. I snuggled the cat closer and wondered if it would be easier just to run away with her for good. I smiled a little when I thought about how the fiancé would be angrier about losing her than me. It seemed so much easier than continuing to let him in close enough to hurt me for the rest of our lives.

Sunday morning I got up and went looking for the cat to head back to Crone Island to think. When I found her on the living room couch I realized that the cold we thought she had was more serious than we had realized. I shouted for the fiancé and we loaded her up and took her to the kitty ER and we lost her. All in about three hours.

That evening I was crying like a four year old. “I. Want. My. Kitty,” I sobbed on the fiancé’s shoulder. “I want her now. Who am I supposed to take to Crone Island?”

“Maybe you don’t have to go.”

“You’re missing the point!”

He wasn’t.

Beyond the accidentally cruel comments and small hurts that are part of any relationship, there is the deep knowledge that someday this person is going to be gone. And I know, conflating putting down the cat and thoughts of the fiancé dying sounds a bit, I don’t know, insane. But the reality is that until she died, I did not realize what Crone Island was really for. The flaws of that reality have come sharply into focus over the past week. The best-friend, whiskey river, kitty snuggle parts of Crone Island are all well and fine. The drinking tea and bitching about a flawed recycling system are okay, too. The walls and hiding from our relationship, not so much.

I’ve stayed away from the Island for the week. I’ve cried while washing up the cat’s dishes and putting away her food. I’ve laughed remembering the inopportune moments she jumped up into our bed. I’ve curled up in the fiancé’s lap and cried and told him that the thought of him dying scares me so badly that I have to fight the urge to run away from our relationship.

And while it’s not whiskey rivers and unicorns, it’s not GMO alligators and She Wolves either. It’s a quiet space where we can be loving and vulnerable, amused and annoyed, frustrated and supportive with one another. While it isn’t as punchy as Crone Island, it has its own name that I like an awful lot.

Home.