That One Summer

I’m crossing the street when Spotify betrays me.

I’ve been listening to a playlist they’ve made for me of songs I’ve listened to in summers past. Music has always served as an extra-sense kind of diary for me. I can picture the bar where I first heard the song Wagon Wheel, or feel the heat of summer night when I played Blackbird for my husband. This particular playlist has a lot of songs I was listening to prior to our wedding and it’s causing a lot of pleasant memories. 

The song that catches me off guard is one that I listened to a lot the summer before I met my husband. A few months before meeting him a friendship became something stickier than a friendship, and I played that song a lot while it was going on. When I met the husband I took the song off my playlists and eventually ghosted on the man. I miss the man involved from time to time but I never really looked back. Hearing this particular song on this particular summer day everything I felt that summer hits, and hits hard. 

The feelings are partially wistfulness for the friendship, but also desire for the person I was that summer. In the stickiness between friendship and sex and not-dating, I was constantly trying to be my most interesting, beautiful, desirable self.

It was amazing.

I was constantly reading and looking for odd bits of interesting news, so I was an excellent conversationalist. Sexual tension is a great incentive to buy new clothes and work out, so I always looked great. Dopamine is a terrific short-term replacement for serotonin, so I felt incredible.

It was terrible.

I was always trying to be witty and I stopped being fun. I was in shape, but worked out and monitored my food to the point of obsession. I was constantly high on the rushes I would get from the guy, but they were always followed by deep sadness when I realized he would never be able to give me what I needed. He left me breathless, in so many ways.

Hearing the song that stops me in the crosswalk leaves me breathless again.

***

Marriage is the hardest thing I’ve ever done. Before the husband, all of my relationships were disposable things. They were opportunities to to try on parts of myself: The Has it All Together Career Woman, The Homemaker, The Wanna-Be Urban Farmer. My marriage is where I can have it mostly together, but I can also have a Saturday where I rewatch Archer and laugh like an idiot. I can whip up coq-au-vin after I set my cookbook on fire.

I can also be the complicated person that my mental health and extreme empathy make me. Usually that’s not a bad person, but we’re playing our marriage on an higher difficulty setting. My mental health issues combined with my husband’s autism mean that our capacity for misunderstanding and hurt feelings is nearly limitless.

But even with that limitless capacity, he’s the one sitting next to me laughing at television, putting out my small fires, and helping me learn to be the beautiful, desirable person that can still be herself.  

***

When I get home, it’s one of the few nights the husband has beat me back to the apartment. He’s cooking something that smells delicious, has fed the cats, and has a bottle of of cold champagne. His day hasn’t left him so overstimulated that he needs quiet in the house, so I turn on the speakers and start writing him a love letter in a language he won’t understand.

I play the song I’ve been listening to since our vacation in North Carolina, a week that felt like a honeymoon we never got to take. I play songs from our wedding and we dance a little in the living room. I play the song that I listen to when I’m mad at him.

I also play him the song from the summer before I met him, so he can know that part of me, too.

I’m sweaty from public transit and stopped wearing makeup after our first date. I’m still getting used to my different body and I don’t have a single interesting thing to tell him about the news or my work.

I accept a cold glass of champagne from him, happy in the knowledge that in this moment I am beautiful, desirable, and, finally, me.

Love and Logic

“Do you want my jacket?”

I’m dazed, sitting in too-big hospital scrubs on a gurney. I have been in the ER for about twenty minutes, after a scary few weeks and a frustrating, unhelpful conversation with our local “Mental Health Urgent Care” that ended in them telling me there was nothing they could do for me.

There are a lot of dehumanizing parts of being in the ER for a mental health intervention. My room has a CCTV camera mounted behind glass in the corner. My door is always open, even when the doctor seeing me is talking to me about extremely personal questions. But the worst part, by far, is that they’ve taken my clothes and other personal items away from me. I’m in a pair of hospital scrubs, a clear signal to anyone walking past my open door that I’m here for a mental health intervention.

I don’t know if the room is cold or I’m having a stress response, but I can’t stop shaking.

The husband gives me his jacket and wraps his arms around me.

***

The husband has recently been diagnosed with autism.

 It’s not the kind of thing you’d really notice about him unless you’ve played a board game and suggested house rules or had an argument with him about time management. I’ve done both (the worst fights we’ve ever had have been over board game rules), and wasn’t terribly surprised by his diagnosis.

He doesn’t know it, but I often see his autism as a kind of super-power.

Before that will make a ton of sense, you have to understand some things about my husband beyond the fact that he has autism. He has a warm and generous heart, often reacting to hard times in someone else’s life by asking “What can we do to help them?” He adores his family and loves telling stories about their oddities or speaking with tremendous pride in his younger sister. And, of course, he is thoughtful and kind to me.

Here’s why he’s my super-hero.

The husband is extremely logical. I nicknamed him my Vulcan years ago. Living with anxiety means that I’m always looking for what people mean beyond their words and actions. I read texts with the highest possible amount of brusqueness intended, even when it's not. I analyze all of my interactions to death and attribute emotions or motives that are usually not there. He’s also honest, sometimes brutally so. But I am learning that he never means harm, and that I can always trust him to help me assess a situation. He can focus intently on things for hours when I am frequently restless and jumping between eighteen projects at a time.

This isn’t to say that he’s perfect, or that his autism doesn’t have negative effects on our lives. He isn’t and it does, but I am grateful he is the person he is.

***

I pull on the husband’s jacket. It’s a warm, and a bright color in the dinginess of the building. I’ve told him a few times that I don’t want to be admitted here as an inpatient, but I also recognize that I’m not making great decisions right now and will listen to what he and the doctors recommend.

But when the mental health staff comes in to separate us and talk to us individually about what should happen to me, I start shaking all over again. Sitting in a hospital room with strange clothes and unknown outcomes and having him taken away from me is the worst moment of my life.

His jacket smells like him, though, and it helps.

When the mental health staff leaves to interview him, I wonder what he’ll say. I’ve been a mess for weeks, and I imagine that it might be nice to be rid of me for a week, if only to get his own sense of equilibrium back. Just a few hours earlier I had told him, in detail, what my suicide plan was. I wouldn’t hold it against him if he told me he wanted me to be admitted to the inpatient program.

The mental health staff drops him back off about half an hour later on their way to talk to the admitting doctor.

“What did you tell them?”

He reaches for my hand and my heart drops.

“That I thought inpatient would make you . . .” he stops, laughs. “Go crazy.”

And despite the hospital scrubs and the open door and the people watching us through the camera I start to laugh. And then to cry. And then to do both at once.

He turns me to look at him.

“Hey, you’re going to be okay. We’re going to get through this together.”

I hear all of the logic and love behind his words. Right now, I don't believe in myself. But I believe in him.

Die Young

"Babe?"

"Yeah, what's up?"

I've wandered out into the living room, still mostly asleep. 

"Is your skin peeling off?"

Even mostly asleep, I can hear the slight laugh in his voice. 

"No, I'm okay."

"Are you sure?"

"Pretty sure."

"I just don't want you to die."

"I think I'm okay for tonight."

"Okay, I love you."

"Love you, too."

***

"Do you feel like you were unprepared for marriage?"

The husband has joined me in therapy. Again, I am discomfited by my therapist's questions about our lives together. 

"I don't know." 

She doesn't push. I don't share. The husband only listens. 

Of course I was unprepared for marriage, I think.

"Did it ever occur to you that you wouldn't get married?"

"Of course."

"What was that like?"

I shrug. "It wasn't bad. I would be in my apartment until I decided I wanted to adopt a dog. I'd keep bees. I'd have friends and help them raise their children. I'd have hobbies and work."

"Anything else?"

"No."

"Would it be a lonely life?"

"I never thought it was."

***

I miss being single.

Whenever I bring this up in front of my friends, they are quick to point out "You hated dating" and "Remember that time you didn't sleep because you were afraid your overnight guest was going to kill you?"

Yes, of course I remember. 

The desire to sometimes be single is one of the most surprising things about being married. There are days when I miss my old Saint Paul apartment with its high ceilings and wood floors. I miss having brussels sprouts or kale salad for dinner. I miss having music on every hour I was awake. I miss being forty pounds lighter. I miss being able to pee with the door open. 

I miss being single. 

***

"Hey."

"Hey."

"This is going to sound really high school, but can I play a song and have you listen to it?"

"Sure, what song is it?"

"Die Young, by Sylvan Esso."

He stops puttering on his laptop at the chorus. 

I was gonna die young.

Now I gotta wait for you, hon.

I had it all planned out before you met me. 

I had a plan, you ruined it completely. 

After listening he asks "Kel, what was your plan for your life if you hadn't met me? Nothing quite so morose as this?"

I shake my head."No, not quite."

***

I was unprepared for a lot of things about marriage. 

I don't know how to share space with another person, or how to disagree on how the cats are being raised. I had no idea how to say, kindly, "Don't be such an ass." I don't know how to not play music whenever I'm at home, or how not to judge someone because they hate vegetables. 

But those are small things, rough edges that I expect to be polished off after a few more years together. The thing that eluded me the most during our courtship, and the thing that continues to elude me now, is that I don't know how to tell another person how much I love them. 

At least, I don't know how to tell this other person. 

My husband and I are at opposite ends of the emotional spectrum. He's the black hole to my supernova, the Spock to my Bones. Many of our biggest fights have been over our inability to speak the same emotional language. As someone who revels in emotions and conversations about them, this has been jarring. 

But more than "Ohh, we're on opposite sides of the emotional spectrum" what's flummoxed me has been my own inability to communicate how much he means to me. He folds me origami rabbits on Valentine's Day, but I can't find a way to tell him everything I want him to know.  

My plan, you see, was never exactly to die young, but it wasn't exactly to make it to the bitter end either. I would have been fine living a full, happy life into my 50s and then slipping away, if not into the ether than out of the lives of my friends and their families. 

And then the husband came into my life.

I was unprepared for how much better life could be with him. How loving him would open my heart and help me to love other people more fully. How I would have the courage to do new things that would fill up the empty parts of my life. How I would get out of bed after nightmares to make sure he was okay sitting up alone. 

So when my therapist asks "Do you think you were unprepared for marriage" the only answer I can think is "Of course I was unprepared for marriage. How do you prepare for this?"

I never knew. 

Newlyweds

My therapist has started to cry.

I'm taken aback. It's something she's never done in front of me before. Not when I was describing being sexually assaulted, not when I talked about suicide and the plan I had a few years ago, not when I spent most of a session crying because I was so lonely and sad I didn't know how to get out of bed in the morning.

The husband has been coming in for a few sessions to understand some of what goes on in therapy, why I feel so shitty afterward, and ways he can help. It's been an odd experience, I think for both of us. The husband has been asked to weigh in on everything from how I handle anger (not well) to how I communicate.

Out of the blue one evening, my therapist asks us why we got married.

Hearing that question from your therapist, in a session, is unsettling at best. It feels like she has some super-secret therapy knowledge and is about to tell you that she doesn't think you should be married, or that one partner is holding something back from the other, or that she thinks you might be related.

At least, it feels that way to me.

We tell her. He tells her about how he suddenly discovered that daily life can be fun and weird with another person. I tell her that he is the most kind and generous person I've ever met. Eventually we're talking to one another and honestly forget that she is there. He tells me how much he loves my friends and I tell him that he pushes me to be a kinder, less judgmental person. I finally tell him:

"You feel like home."

That's when my therapist blows her nose, loudly, and we realize we're still in a session.

"I'm sorry," she tells us. "I do a lot of work in couples' therapy, and I tend to see people at the end of their marriages. It's nice to see a couple who's still so in love with one another."

***

Our first five months of marriage have been, well, a lot like the last two and a half years of being together. 

I'm not sure what I was expecting. Our arguments to be, if not magically solved, at least put on the shelf for a couple months? A musical to break out every morning when we wake up? A refusal to leave the house unless we were together? Sunshine and rainbows to magically shoot out of our asses all the time?  

The truth is our lives are very much what they've always been. 

We hold hands in the back of cabs. We fight, infrequently, but it's hard when we do. I still go to bed early while he stays up late watching B-horror movies. We text one another "Do you need anything from Target while I'm here?" instead of "I love you and am thinking about you." We Skype with out-of-state friends, plan and host day-long board game days, dance in the living room to Motown, snuggle the cats, crack one another up. The rhythm of our lives hasn't changed much. 

I find it comforting.

***

We're in a cab on the way home from a double date with some of our friends. 

We're saving for a house and recovering from a wedding, so we haven't been out much in the past few months. An occasional game night, a dinner at a friend's house, but few nights like this one. The ride home itself isn't anything special. Me, enthusing over the drinks we had, the couple we saw, my hopes about our future house. Him, holding my hand, talking about the dinner we're hosting next week, the couple he hopes to see soon, and his hopes for our future house. 

It's just an ordinary cab ride.

Or, at least, it is until we arrive home and the cab driver turns off the the meter and turns around to talk to us. 

"You two seem very happy together," he says. "You disagree about something and can just let it go. My wife and I argue a lot. How do you do it?"

We're stunned for a moment and don't know what to say. Before I can make a crack about us being newlyweds, he stops me to tell us that he has been astounded by our kindness and agreeableness, particularly the husband's. He remarks that we are obviously extremely happy together, and thanks us for being wonderful passengers to eavesdrop on. Eventually, as we thank him and get out of the cab. He stops the husband and says: "I am going to take some of what I learned from you tonight home to my wife. It's nice to see a couple so in love with one another."

***

Our first five months of marriage have been nothing like the last two and a half years together. 

We do many of the same things, but something fundamental in our relationship has shifted. Our arguments no longer leave me wondering "Is this going to be the one that splits us up?" We smile when "our" song from the Thrilling Adventure Hour Musical Episode comes on at home. I begin to work out again, and come home to a smiling husband, happy for his alone time, too.

There is an unanticipated weight to saying "This is my husband" and hearing him say "This is my wife." When I am angry or lonely, I look down at my wedding band and remember that there is someone who will carry some of that anger or loneliness if I ask for help. The rhythm of our life hasn't changed, but I'm surprised to find a harmony introduced. 

And while therapists sobbing and cab drivers telling us how wonderful we are are rare occurrences, I find them reassuring. Perhaps all the sunshine and rainbows I've been seeing lately aren't only coming out of our asses.  

Flat

For most of my adult life, there was something about being sad that felt homey.

You know, the kind of sadness that involves old time country music, a desire for rainy days, and a bottle of bourbon. The kind of sadness you can curl up with.

I always secretly loved that kind of sadness, and it often found me after a breakup when I wasn’t particularly interested in the other person. There was something pleasant about having license to keep to myself and not need to expend any emotional energy beyond, “Wow, I’m pretty bummed right now” and then drinking like my life was a Patsy Cline song.

To be clear, I wasn't seeking the kind of emotional emptiness that finds you during a depressive episode. It was the kind of sadness that could eventually be lifted by a sunny day or a long run or an A on a paper I had written.

The self-indulgent sadness was an emotional state that I pursued and reveled in when I could get it just right. And “just right” usually meant “going through a breakup with a person I don't actually call back” or “regretting that one-night-stand with the ex who just broke my heart.”

It was the kind of sadness that was addictive.

***

The fiancé and I were in a fight that felt like the Second Labor of Hercules.

He and I fight infrequently. So infrequently, in fact, that when we were dating I wondered if our relationship wasn’t passionate enough (hey, we all have our own shit). And usually when we do fight it ends in us going to bed and waking up to have a rational conversation the next day.

This was not one of those fights.

It was the sort of fight that went on for days, and when we finally cut off one of its heads and thought we were all right, the next day would find me sobbing on the couch over something different.

There were a lot of tedious reasons it was so hard (ineffective communication, a desire to be the Right and Reasonable One in the relationship, new medications that were causing mood swings, blah blah blah). But it was hard. Harder than anything we’ve done together in the past two years.

The hardest part was I was unprepared for the intensity of my anger. There were days when I would be talking to my best friend and shaking with rage. Whether it was a function of new meds or wedding stress, or finally having feelings again after a year of depression I can’t say. And, truthfully, I didn’t examine what was going on too closely. All I knew was I was angry and one night found me angry enough  that I started packing a bag to sleep on my best friend’s couch. As I stuffed pajamas into my bag and looked for my earrings for the next day, I heard the front door open and the fiancé talking to the cats. I deflated and asked myself:

“What the hell am I doing?”

He found me sitting on our bed, crying.

***

Prior to the fiancé, all of my relationships imploded between three and five months.

Some were my fault, others weren’t. Ultimately they didn’t work out because we would fight and I would give them the finger and go sit in my home wishing for rain and listening to Hank Williams. They ended because I didn’t care enough for them to continue.

And there was something comforting about those endings. The emotions were one-dimensional and soothing in their flatness.

Now, with the fiancé, it’s never just one emotion. It’s joy with aggravation, love with happiness, anger with sadness and frustration and fourteen other feelings I can’t identify. They are confusing and crazy-making and what had me packing my bag to sleep on the best friend’s couch. I’d lived so many years with flat, straightforward emotions that I was utterly unprepared for emotional complexity, especially the kind that combines love and anger and frustration.

Unprepared actually doesn’t even scratch the surface.

The night I was packing my bag, I was angry beyond any anger I’d ever experienced. Of course I was.  I’d spent five days distilling sadness, distress, and frustration into something flat and easier to deal with. Rage is so much more comfortable than sadness. When I heard the fiancé’s voice at the door, I realized that I didn’t want to be flat anymore. When he came in and sat down next to me, I told him everything. He listened—he listened for a long time while I told him every emotion I was having and all of the ones I couldn't identify and how complicated everything was for me at the moment. We talked, and all of those stupid, complex emotions found a voice.

The funny thing is that even when I was sad and leaning waaaaaaay into it, it wasn't as satisfying as it used to be. No amount of Johnny Cash or Sam Houston whiskey brought back that feeling of pleasant self-indulgence or even the comfort that it used to bring. Rather than being a flat, understandable emotion, sadness was huge and complicated and made me feel so awful that it was hard to make it through the day without crying at my desk.

Instead, the rush of relief I was seeking came after talking and listening and apologies from both of us, when I went to bed with a glass of water, some music, and, well, him. He put his arms around me and kissed my hair and told me he loved me. One of the cats jumped into bed and headbutted me. Still a little sniffly, I closed my eyes and said out loud "Yes, this is home."

White Rabbits

We're in a hotel somewhere outside Madison, Wisconsin. I'm talking to the fiance from the bathroom, the kind of winding-down-from-the-day conversation that doesn't require a participant, only a listener. He's reading on the couch, drinking whiskey and unwinding in his own way. When I fall into bed and ask "Are you coming?" he repiles "I have to finish something. I'll be there in a little bit." Knowing his nocturnal habits, love of whiskey, solitude, and books I turn out the light and sleep. When I wake in the morning, a small, white, origami rabbit greets me from the bedside table.

I cry so hard I wake him up.

***

The past months have been, well, shitty. 

I discovered that there's no easy way to tell your friends, your fiance, your doctors, that you've been thinking you'd be better off dead. 

No, maybe not so much dead, but wishing that you could magically stop existing. Just, *poof!* be gone from the world and its revolving door of bullshit. 

Anyway, it's a hard thing to say. 

I didn't tell my friends and fiance because I thought it was a passing thing. I didn't say anything to my therapist because I didn't want to be committed. And it wasn't like I was planning to harm myself. I just wanted to stop. 

Being not-quite-suicidal is a weird place to be It was weird when I was isolated, living alone in the North Country,  and it's even weirder now that I share my daily life with another person I love deeply. Try to imagine spending 3/4 of every day thinking "I would rather not be than be what I am right now." and then spending the remaining 1/4 of the day thinking "I can't wait to meet my new niece" or "Gosh, our first dance at our wedding is going to be great." Mix in having obsessive-compulsive disorder and a total  inability to deal with conflict in any capacity and you're off to the races. 

Eventually I say it out loud to to the fiance and the best friend. They send me off to the shrink with directions to be honest. I didn't end up institutionalized. Instead I got a lot of cheery "You're doing great! Everything will be okay! Everyone loves you and you're well supported!" I know it's her job, but Jesus Christ, lady. I'm drowning here, I don't need compliments on how well I'm doing the dead man's float. I need a fucking life preserver. The doctor is more helpful, she changes my medication, promises me that this time we've probably zeroed in on a better combination of of benzos, SSRIs, and sleeping pills. And God bless her, she does it without puking rainbows.

More helpful than therapists puking rainbows or doctors with prescription pads, the fiance is there at the end of every day. He's the one who sits and holds my hand during panic attacks and helps me slow down my breathing. He makes me dinner and takes me to my therapy appointments and snuggles me to sleep. 

I love him so much, but right now it's hard to tell him. Trying to muster the the energy to get into the shower is more than I can handle most days , being an empathetic, loving partner sometimes feels impossible. So I do what I can. I schedule massages for him. I meet him at the door with a glass of whiskey when he gets home from work. I do my best to get up off the couch and have an actual conversation. 

And I hope that it's enough. 

***

Sometime during the winter I sit with he the fiance while he plays my favorite videogame. It's a narrative RPG about a relationship. The main character's wife has a mental illness and has a hard time talking to her husband. She loves him deeply, but because of her mental illness she doesn't know how to tell him. Because she can't figure out how to tell him that she loves him, she folds him hundreds of origami rabbits over the course of their complicated relationship to say "I love you."

He doesn't understand.

The fiance and I play the ending together (me couch co-oping) and when I burst into tears at the end, he wraps his arms around me and lets me cry. I want to say that I wanted him to play the game not only because it's beautiful but because I feel like the woman in the story, and I need him to know that I love him, even when I don't know how to say it. 

But even over the winter, things are bumpy. There are panic attacks and depression. I'm still making it to the shower, but sleep most of the time I'm not at work. And I discover that I can't tell him what I'm feeling even when the moment is exactly what I've been waiting for. 

When I wake to find the white origami rabbit next to our bed somewhere outside of Madison. Wisconsin, I realize that I don't have to say it. He learned to understand my own white rabbits a long time ago

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.