Full moon and freezing cold and falling snow and the ones I love. That's what I want in my snow globe tonight. It's so beautiful here tonight! Seven of us squealing and jumping in and out of the hot tub by the pool naked under the peekaboo moon and catching snowflakes and running in to sprawl on towels by the fire and make love, and make love, and make love. A perfect night. I'm so happy tonight I could melt glaciers with a glance.

Fear me, O Snow Gods, my girls and I bring the heat of love and we melt the world! Everything is right tonight. Lucia is happy, Zizi is happy, all the Island is happy, we have friends around the world who are happy tonight, and I hope you're happy too. This moment in the cold snowy world, this first of December with the ones I love and the falling snow under the full moon, I want this night sealed in a snow globe to hold in my heart forevermore. I'll keep it warm. I promise.

Tonight we suddenly had the same feeling, me and Lucia and Zizi. We all felt it. We all said it. We're there. Where are we? We're where we wanted to be. We've barely started and we're already there. The road goes ever on, we know we've barely begun to go down this road together, we have a million miles to go and there are still dragons in the woods and darkness under the pillowed hills and where we're going is a Neverland east of the sun and west of the moon, second star to the right and straight on till morning, and who are we kidding, we're really not there yet, are we---but yes we are there. This is the place in the fairy tale where they all live happily ever after.

I know, I know, turn the page and right there in the next chapter we're all fighting pirates by dawn's early light and wondering where the fuck the night went, but tonight we're there. In our perfect snow globe on the Island, with the full moon and the falling snow. Living happily ever after. You too.

Stella

It's Thanksgiving, and I want to say thanks. I'm thankful for so many things. Every year I have more to be thankful for. For my life. For all the love in my life, and for all the love in the world. For all my friends, here on LiveJournal and around the world (and especially in the UK), thank you for everything, for being who you are, for being part of the world, for sharing your lives with me. I don't have anything very profound or funny or smart to say this Thanksgiving. I just want to say thank you.

To the ones I love, thank you for loving me, and for letting me love you. Thank you for being part of my life, and making me part of yours. Lucia, thank you for your love and for my life. For things beyond words, beyond imagining. You are my life. I could not live without you. Zizi, thank you for loving me! For opening your heart to me, to all of us, and for letting us take you into our hearts. You're home, now and forever. To Michelangelo and Maria and Maravilha and the Hexagon, thank you for so much more than I can say.

And to the Island! Thank you for being my family! My life, my home, my past, present and future. Every one of you. Lucia, Zizi, Rachel, Caitie, Evie, Ronnie, Annie, Danny, Joshie, Kelly and Ciara, I love you all!

Stella

My turn! This is Stella taking over from Kelly and Ciara, because they both had big papers to write for class this week. And because everyone here is busy! And because this part is mine to tell. (Thanks for all the pretty new icons, Kell!)

I have to go back a few months. Here’s one simple (but confusing) version of events: This spring the Island received a very unusual and unexpected offer. We thought about it and we said No, with our regrets. Things evolved over the spring and summer, and we did too. Our No with regrets turned into a No unless and then into a Yes if and on into a Yes we hope and finally into an unconditional YES! In the meantime the Island grew to eleven, with Ciara and Kelly—and now twelve. The twelfth is named Zizi, and Zizi is mine. She's Lucia’s property, like me, and my slave.

Current events: Last Friday night Zizi and I were all set to make some small changes in her body, under Lucia’s supervision and with the Island and the Hexagon there to help and support us (and party afterwards). Relatively minor modifications, but with serious consequences. Three little rings, two in her nipples and one in her pussy (where I wear one too). I was prepping her and she was excited and so was I, and she said something innocent and sweet that made me stop everything in its tracks. She said, more or less, she couldn’t wait to wear my rings, because this would finally make her completely mine, and she was so proud to finally be able to give me something real.

I wasn’t angry or disappointed or upset with her, I simply realized we had a little more preparation to do together. I told her, more or less, that only she could make herself completely mine, I could claim her as mine but I needed her to make the final leap herself, with her own will and her own consent, and she had already given me something much more real and valuable to me than her body, as perfect as her body is: Her heart. I knew I was asking more of her than anyone else had ever asked of her as a slave: Her consent, her willing surrender with all her heart, her faith and commitment and trust and love and spirit and imagination and hope, but most of all her heart. I knew as long as she still thought, in even the last little corner of her mind, that I could or would make her my slave all by myself, by some magical act or the power of my own will alone, that she was still just the plaything of forces far beyond her control, or that all she had to give me of any value and reality was her body, we still had some talking to do. And we did, we’ve been talking for days, and everything is back on the right path. I’m so proud of her! We’re proud of each other.

Tomorrow Zizi will be pierced to wear my rings in what has become the de facto (un)dress code for slaves here on the Island. All that’s missing: Her nipples, her left nostril and her triangle (to keep company with her beautiful horizontal hood ring, her septum, her tongue and her belly button). Those piercings will happen tomorrow night. She’s already collared, by me and Lucia, permanently and invisibly, but tomorrow she’ll have two new collars to wear, one of heavy stainless steel to wear for me and Lucia when we’re home alone with the Island, one of sterling silver and diamonds to wear out in public to show the world she’s loved and treasured and she belongs to someone who thinks she’s unique and wonderful and valuable. Because she is.

And later I’ll tell more about how all this happened, maybe the longer and less confusing version. (No not really, even the long version is confusing.)

Stella

All I can say is that sometimes you need to hear something more than once before you believe it. Maybe you need to hear it more than a thousand times, if you’ve been trained not to believe it, or to believe something that conflicts with it. Maybe you’ll need to hear it every day for the rest of your life. I can do that. And sometimes words alone are not enough, feelings alone are not enough, sometimes you need to see it in action before you can believe it’s real. Sometimes the one saying the words needs to go beyond the words. I had to do that Friday night, and I had to take something away in order to give something deeper and more important. I took away something beautiful, because it was hiding the truth. (But I’m giving it back to her soon. We’ll be ready soon.)

Friday night I had to stop something just as it was beginning. Everyone was waiting for me to say we were ready, and I had to tell them we weren’t ready and it wasn’t going to happen that night. So we had the party first instead of second. Lucia backed me up completely. I stopped things suddenly because something that she said made me suddenly afraid we might have unknowingly made a wrong turn or suffered a setback. After I stopped things in their tracks and we talked it through again, a thousand more times, then I was sure everything was all right. But we’re not moving forward with what I stopped, not for a little while. Not until I’m sure we’re moving in the right direction, together, all three of us. I have a target date, but right now only Lucia knows that date.

Gee, this was a little cryptic, wasn’t it? Sorry. It’s hard for me to describe what went a little wrong without first describing a thousand things that are going right. Describing what went wrong won’t make any sense without bringing you up to speed on everything going on here. Some of you know a lot about that, but a lot of you have no idea, and that’s my fault. My LJ used to be a reasonably good record of most of the important things going on in my life and a lot of the unimportant things too, and I loved it being that kind of journal, but it’s not anymore and hasn’t been for quite a while. I’m a little behind, and my little behind will have to work to correct that defect somehow, if keeping this journal is still going to be a meaningful thing for me to do. I don’t know if it really is anymore, but I’d still like it to be.

These are some of the thousand words I said to her Friday night. If I could have said all this in that moment as perfectly as I possibly could, without missing a word or using any extra words or explaining my words, this is something like what I might have said. (I had to use a lot more words than this Friday night, and she did too. Everything is better now. We have a lot more to say to each other, and we have the time to say it.)

Baby, marking your body as mine will not make you mine. Nothing I or anyone can ever do to your body can make you mine or anyone else’s simply by doing it to you. Not collars or chains or cages or bits, not needles or rings or ink or blades or red-hot branding irons, none of those things can make you mine. Only you can really make you mine. Only by giving me your love, your surrender, your consent to being mine. Your love is what I want most of all. Our relationship has to come first. The marks have to come last.

I want more than your body. You are not just your body. The way you were taught and trained in the past is in your past. If your future is going to be mine, with me, it has to be a future we create together, not just a continuation of your past. I do want to own your body too, I want to mark it as my property, I want to see and touch and kiss your marks and know they’ll remind both of us forever of what we are to each other and who you belong to, but those marks are just symbols. I love those symbols, I know you do too, I know how much you want them, but they are not the truth, they can only be symbols of the truth.

What I want from you is not just the symbols and marks of owning you, I want YOU. All of you. Your heart, soul, mind, spirit, dreams, hopes, desires, life and love, and most of all your love. I want your future and your freedom, not to destroy it or lock it away, but to share it with you. And I want your body too. I can’t truly possess any part of you by force or by outside authority or by locking up your body or by marking your skin. No one can, and whatever anyone takes from you by force without your willing surrender of your heart and life means nothing. Less than nothing.

This is the only way I can own you, the only way you can be mine: If I win your heart. If you give me your heart. If you and I can do those two things together, all the rest will follow. My ownership of you and your enslavement to me will be the truth, not just symbols. And then whatever marks I give you to wear for me someday (someday soon, baby) will be true. The truth will not live in our marks, but in our hearts. And when we’re both ready, and we know we’re both ready, I’ll make this happen for us. Soon.

Stella

(Thank you, everyone, for supporting me Friday night and carrying all of us through the night.)

When did the past end for you, and when did the future start? If in one single moment your life changed forever, would you remember that date? The date when your old life ended and your new life began, would you circle that number on the calendar? If one moment you were a free woman, and torn and broken and miserable and lost, and the next moment you were a slave and owned and loved and whole and happy and overflowing with joy, would you ever forget the day that happened? Would that date be written in your heart forever? Tell me that date.

October 28, 2006. That was the date. Tomorrow is our third anniversary. Lucia and I began our new life that day, late that night, in bed, in a hotel room in the mountains, with snow falling outside. On the 28^th day of that October we walked into a cold dark room believing we had no future together and we would soon have to part and live two very different lives. Everything changed that night. We walked away hand in hand into a new life as Owner and property, Mistress and slave, lovers, partners, best friends. Partners forever.

Two hearts, one star: Two human beings sharing one destiny, one fate, one fortune, one path, one life. One life, not two. For three years, tomorrow.

Will we be celebrating? Oh yeah, we’ll be celebrating! The whole Island will be celebrating with us, eleven of us here, one far away, but we’ll hear her voice and she’ll hear ours. Someday we’ll have an anniversary to celebrate with her too, the day her life changed forever. Everyone on the Island has had a moment like that, when the past ended and the future began. But tomorrow belongs to Lucia and me.

Lucia, as fiercely and achingly happy as I was to become yours three years ago, I am infinitely happier today! I know you’re happy too. Your happiness is what I live for and what makes my happiness, and my life, possible. And good. Our life together is so much bigger and brighter now than I ever imagined it could be. I cannot conceive of my life without you, without belonging to you, without serving you, without loving you and being loved by you. I am yours, now and forever. Happy third anniversary, Lucia. 

Your Stella

 PS  I love you, baby. I hope you like your present...

We’re home. My name is Stella, Lucia’s lucky star, Stella Luciae, and we’re home. Lucia and me. Home with the Island. Hi everybody!
          It’s been so long since I wrote anything on LJ, I thought I should reintroduce myself. This is also my first appearance on insulanova . I’m crossposting this—to my own blog at stelladellasera and the new Island blog at insulanova. There are three Island blogs now, these two and Caitie’s kissmecaitlin . Kelly and Ciara picked insulanova up off the virtual beach where Caitie and I dropped it in the sand this summer. Caitie and I started it and abandoned it, but Kelly and Ciara saved it and made something beautiful out of it. Thanks, baby tigers! You rock and you roar.
          Insulanova belongs to the entire Island, our whole family. The plan is for this to be a journal for anyone and everyone on the Island to write whatever anyone wants to about anything at all. Probably mostly about what’s happening on the Island. But anything might happen here. And sometimes maybe nothing. But I think mostly something. 
          Which is more than what’s been happening on my own blog, stelladellasera, which is mostly nothing. I’ve been a bad blogger and worse than bad for quite a while now, oh say a year or so. I can’t possibly fill in all the blanks I’ve left in the Island record in the past year. Maybe someday I’ll try, but not today. Maybe the rest of the Island will do a better job here on insulanova than I can on my own. Or maybe I’ll leave it to the ghosts who write history books. All I want to do right now is tell where everyone on the Island is tonight.
            Eight of us are at home in Colorado, in three different cities. The snow is gone and it’s going to be a beautiful weekend. Four more of us are away having adventures, either in transit or on assignment. Lucia and I are celebrating tonight: Being home with the Island, being together, and winning a stunning victory in a strange little battle Lucia and I just fought at work. Another story, another time. (Maybe.)
            Two of us are away at college. Kelly is in her dorm room tonight, one of our old dorms, up in Boulder. Ciara is at her own unique little college in Colorado Springs. Six of us are at home at Island West, the house in Denver we all share: Ronnie and Annie, Danny and Josh, Lucia and me. Lucia and I just got home last night. We were away for two and a half weeks having various adventures. We were in Portugal for a wedding, and wedding parties, and part of the honeymoon, and another honeymoon of our own. We were with the Island, we were among people we love, and we were all alone, just the two of us and Lisbon, a city we love almost as much as we love our home, and then again we weren’t quite alone, there were a few ghosts keeping us company too.
            Rachel, Caitie and Evie are at Evie’s old house near Anchorage, Alaska, getting ready to fly home tomorrow. They were with us in Portugal for the first week, then they spent a week in Vermont and Maine visiting friends and Evie’s family, before flying to Alaska for a couple of days on business. Zizi is away on assignment with our very good friends the Hexagon, at their estate out in the horse country in Northern Virginia. She was with us in Portugal too, and before that she was in London and France with Maria and Michelangelo of the Hex, on another adventure. Right now she’s helping them get ready to have a baby, Maravilha’s baby girl. Her first baby, her Master’s second, the Hexagon’s third. Baby Girl is due on Halloween (according to her momma Maravilha). We don’t know exactly when Zizi will be home, but she will be back here, along with the Hexagon and Hexagon Baby Number Three, sometime before Thanksgiving. Many thanks will be said when she returns. Lucia and I will be there for the birth too.
            Who are we, all of us, who’s who and what’s what, who belongs to whom, who’s the Hexagon, where did Zizi come from all of a sudden, and what the hell is this mysterious Island thing anyway? Oh never mind, if you’re reading this you know all about that. (Don’t you?)
            No more news from the Island tonight. I’m with the woman I love and belong to and the people I adore, there’s music and dancing and love here tonight, and I have to go help make more of all three of those things. Welcome to the Island, and to insulanova, and love and kisses to you wherever you are tonight.           

Stella

 

Today is my saint’s day. September 23 is a high holy day in my religion. And no, I don’t mean that in a literal way or a religious way or even in a serious way, but then again, in a way I do. On September 23, 1907, one hundred and two years ago, there was born in Rochefort-sur-Mer on the Atlantic coast of France a certain Anne Desclos, who later became Dominique Aury, who became Pauline Réage, who wrote a novel in French called Histoire d’O, which became in English Story of O. And which has become in some small and thankfully incomplete measure the story of my life. Today is her birthday. My saint's day, for Sainte Pauline.
            Histoire d’O was published in Paris in 1954 and has been banned and unbanned and loved and loathed and forgotten and rediscovered ever since. It’s never been out of print, and they say it’s the most widely translated French novel in history. Anne Desclos wrote it in suffering and secrecy, under a nom de plume masking a nom de guerre. As Dominique Aury she was well known in the French literary world, but as Pauline Réage  she lived a more or less secret life, until she revealed her several identities only a few years before her death in 1998. Histoire d’O was written as a love letter to the man she loved so desperately she would have been his slave, and though she was in some measure his, in secret, he could never be completely hers. Many of us, in particular women like me, know and love this book as one of the most beautiful and seductive and dangerous and heartbreaking books ever written. (And no, not the movie! Corinne Clery is lovely as O, but the film versions of Story of O are some of the worst movies ever made. Read the book! Please?)
            Some of us encountered Story of O far too young (I was seventeen) to have any adult defenses against its deadly beauty, nor did we desire any such defenses, and we have worshiped it devotedly ever since. Some of us have read it and reread it so many times we know it almost by heart. I have, and many of my best friends and lovers have, and so have many of the countless women I’ve met who are or were or dream of being slaves. My friend Maria at ravenna_amorosa calls us the Secret Order of the Sisters of Ste. Pauline, a mythical and quasi-mystical order of consensual slaves, women dedicated to a level of service and self-sacrifice far beyond even the most severe traditional religious order. (Except we hardly ever wear nuns’ habits. Except sometimes at parties. Until we take them off.) All we ask of our Owners is to be allowed to live a life something like O’s life—but with a happy ending. O ends her life by asking her Master to be allowed to die. All I ask of my Mistress is to be allowed to live as her slave forever. (Her answer is always yes.)
            I’ve found my personal Story of O and my happy ending (at least so far), and yes, it’s very different in so many ways from O’s life and death in Histoire d’O, and this is a very good thing. Story of O is a fable, and a fable can be a tricky thing to use as a design for living. (Ask Hansel and Gretel.) Assuming you want to find a happy ending. I do, and my life has taken some very different turns from O’s life in Story of O. Even a slave, I have learned and keep learning, has to take an active part in finding her own happy ending. I’ve found the life I was meant to live, and I thank God for that, and most of all I thank the woman I love and belong to with all my heart—and yet I also thank Ste. Pauline, under all her many names and disguises, the founder of my Order, for creating part of the map that led me to the place where I am now.
            Thank you, Anne Desclos, for your life and your suffering and your secret love, and for giving us O. Happy birthday, wherever you are.

Stella

 

           

 

 

 

 

Tonight the moon is half full. Like my heart.
            Don’t try to read too much into that line. That’s one of those lines that once it comes to you, you can’t wait to say it. Besides, it’s not even true. My heart is so full tonight even the full moon couldn’t hold it all. That half moon high above us tonight could fit inside my heart and leave room for all the stars.
           We’re having a party tonight. I’m not alone, I have someone looking over both shoulders and I’m writing this on the kitchen laptop on the kitchen counter while I’m watching the people I love dancing slow to “Summertime.” We’re at Rachel and Caitie and Eva’s tonight, and they have an actual dance floor in an actual (smallish) ballroom, for God’s sake, and still we always end up dancing in the kitchen. This kitchen is full of love and moonlight, that’s why we’re in here. The house is full of candles and wine and music and people, the Hexagon is here with us, every last one of them, so the party is twenty-one tonight. Plus babies. Somewhere in this house two babies are sleeping with someone watching over them, somewhere someone is making love, somewhere people are talking about things that are dear to their hearts, someone is out by the pool watching the half moon slipping through the clouds, and here in the kitchen the rest of us are dancing slow and yelling Play it again! every time “Summertime” drawls to an end. And my heart is so full it’s overflowing like a moon full of milk.
            My heart is full for so many reasons. It would take until the full moon to tell you all of them. Here’s a few. What an amazing summer this has been, from Miami to the Inferno and everything in between. People I love are having babies soon, this fall. One of them is here tonight, slow dancing with everyone, seven-month baby belly and all. I’ve never seen her so happy! Or so big. She says she’s having her Master’s baby girl on Halloween, and no one knows how she knows these things, but she does, and if she says that’s the way it will happen, it will. Lucia says we’ll be there in Virginia with her and her Master that very night. And if Lucia says it will happen, it will.
            Here’s a few more. A friend of mine far away is in love with an amazing woman, and even though not very long ago all seemed lost, her dreams are coming true. She is making her dreams come true. Our New Girls are starting school, one last week and one next week. They’re starting their second year of college as full members of the Island and I love them both and I couldn’t possibly be prouder of them. They’re wonderful. They’re building a unique new part of the Island that isn’t quite like any other part. My baby brother just started classes for his doctorate, and I’m very proud of him too, and even prouder of his new Mistress and the brave new corner of the Island they’re building together. We’re all very proud of our new/old house and our brand-new pool (the other one, not the one here at this house). Rachel and Caitie and Eva are about to celebrate the first anniversary of Evie’s collaring to Caitie, and the three of them collaring each other, and that’s a whole full moon’s worth of love story right there. The relationship the three of them have built in just one year is one of the most beautiful things on the Island. Or anywhere under the moon.
           One more little slice of the moon and then I have to go dance with my girls! We have to send someone away from the Island very soon, a little over a week from now. Someone I love and who loves us. We have some big questions to resolve and big challenges to overcome, and we’re not quite certain tonight when we’ll see her again. Maybe not until Halloween. But we will. And things are changing with her, and with us, and things have been said tonight, and tonight I’m more certain than ever that she’ll be coming back to us this fall or this winter.
            She said to me, late last night, “Does it really matter who I love?” I said yes, baby, it matters very much. She asked me again why that matters to anyone, because she’s only a slave, and she never thought it would matter. I told her it matters to us because we love her and we want her to be happy, and on the Island slaves have the right to be happy too. She asked me if it really matters who a slave wants to belong to, and why should it matter. Everyone has told her for weeks that it matters very much to us, but it goes against all the training she’s ever had—until she was sold to the Hexagon and the Island. I said yes, it matters more than anything, because we want her to belong to an Owner she can serve with all her heart and mind and soul, not just her body. She asked me if I thought her Owners would really let her belong to the one she wanted to belong to, no matter who it was. “This could this really happen for me? Just a slave?”
            I caught my breath, and I told her—very carefully, because I’m not one of her two Owners—that the final decision would have to be theirs, but I was certain they would never do anything that would break her heart, or make her serve someone she didn’t love, and that I was sure they would want her to belong to whoever she loved the most and needed most to belong to. Lucia has promised her that, and I promised her again that we’ll make this happen for her. She snuggled down into my arms and thought for a moment. Then she said, very matter of factly, “Then Stella I will be yours. I will come back to the Island, and I will be yours and Lucia’s. I promise.” I couldn’t say anything for a moment. She looked up at me and whispered, “If you really still want me.” I said yes. That’s all I could say. (We said more a little later.)
            That’s one reason, among many others, why I think she’ll be coming home to us. And why my heart is more than half full of moonlight tonight. I have to go and dance some more, so the rest of the moonlight is yours. (Take all you want, we’ll make more! Summertime is not quite over yet, you know.)

 

Stella (thanks, Lucia)

 

 

 

 

When a dream dies, a part of your heart dies with it. When a dream dies it can make you wish you were never born, never lived, never dreamed. Do not let that happen to you. Keep your dreams alive, and your dreams will keep you alive. 

When someone you care about has a dream and that dream dies, or seems to die, it's like suffering a death in the family. I'm working through all the stages of grief over the death of a dream right now. No, this is not a death in my immediate family, the Island, or in any of our own families. But a dream seems to have died for a friend I care about very much, and I'm feeling a little part of her grief, just as if there were a death in my extended family. I shared those dreams with her, and through her with the others who were dreaming that same dream. I know my own pain is just a teardrop in the ocean of what she's feeling right now. I want her to know my heart is with her. If I could take the pain away and bear it for her I would.

My own personal dreams, big and little? The Island's dreams? Alive and well and bigger and brighter than ever. I'm lucky. After years and years where my dreams kept getting farther and farther away, my life turned around. My dreams keep coming true. Because I'm so smart? No, just lucky. And because I kept chasing my dreams. The Island is a lucky place, and we're growing and thriving. Not without some growing pains, but we're home and happy and busy and living and loving, and dreaming. I'll get through my personal share in my friend's grief, and perhaps she'll let me try to help her get through hers. Not every dream comes true, I know that, though we had high hopes for this dream and it seemed to be coming true so beautifully. I know sometimes one dream has to die so another can be born. But sometimes it seems a dream dies with nothing to take its place, and afterwards the world seems very empty. The world can be cold and hard and lonely, and keeping a dream alive can be the hardest thing in the world to do. I know all this. 

But not every dream dies so easily. Don't let them die! Fight for them. Love is worth fighting for. Dreams are worth dying for. The world is a big place, but also in cosmic terms a small, round, cozy place. Distance is no barrier if the dream is big enough, and airplanes fly both ways around this small world of ours. I've stepped onto an airplane to chase a dream. I've discovered sometimes I was chasing the wrong dream, and it took another airplane to take me back to the right one. I've learned that some dreams come back to life long after you think they're dead and buried. Some dreams never die. Broken hearts can heal, dreams can live again, and the only fate worse than death is to stop loving and stop dreaming.

So grieve for what's gone and grieve for what you have to let go of and grieve for what you fought for and can't save. Let others share your grief with you and your load will be lighter. But please remember, whoever is reading this, love is worth fighting for and dreams are worth chasing. Fight for your dreams and hold onto the ones you love, and don't let go. That's what life is all about. 

Last night was the last test. We had to reach the island, starting from the Ninth Circle of the Inferno. We stood on the shore of the little lake in the hanging valley at sunset. The Island, all twelve of us, had to swim those freezing black waters naked and climb ashore, shivering and laughing, on the tiny island in the center of the lake. Then we drank the champagne we found there and lit the candles and danced in the indigo glow of the twilight, and waited for the full moon to rise in the valley below and take us home.
             And the moon rose, fat and blazing red-orange through heat of the plains far below our little Island, as if it were ascending to meet us through the flames of the Inferno. Out first glimpse of the moon took our breath away, it was so beautiful. We let the moon rise and shine a little brighter on our tiny Island, and then we began the two-hour hike back to the cabin in the moonlight. The moon took us home.
            We made it! The Inferno is over! Seven of us went down into the Ninth Circle last Saturday, and twelve of us climbed out of it Wednesday night. The Inferno is over. For now.
            We are proud and happy and blown away and exhausted. We slept and played and ate and drank and fucked all day, and tonight we held a Star Chamber by the firepit in the meadow at Circle Camp, by popular demand, just to talk about the whole thing, the twelve of us. We started with five Guides to take seven slaves down into the Ninth Circle and run them through the trials we had planned, and I was one of the seven. Five running seven was a hell of a lot of work, but I had some whispered advance knowledge from my Owner that this imbalance was not meant to last. At about hour thirty, midnight Sunday night, three of us were surreptitiously pulled out, one by one, from where we were sleeping in the slave stockade we’d built in the woods at the edge of the big meadow. Joshie and Annie and I were “brevetted” from slaves condemned to torment and trial in the Inferno to Guides and guardian angels. (We’re still slaves, but now we were serving the Island above the whip, not beneath.)
            That left four slaves down in the Inferno, Evie, Ciara, Kelly and Zizi. Our newest and youngest members of the Island. Each very different in background and training and personality and strengths. We had an “overtarget” of getting at least one slave through one whole week of Inferno, stretching right to this Saturday afternoon. That’s what I was told the target was before we started: One slave, one full week. But the secret target, I was told later, was always to get as many slaves as possible to the full moonrise last night. Our Inferno this summer was designed to be short, intense, and wild. We succeeded, and we got everyone to the moon on time.
            More later, and I want to write something about Danny and Joshie, and about everyone, but no time tonight. I have to go party! We’re back from the meadow, full of champagne and moonlight, there’s a roaring fire in the fireplace, the party is rocking and rolling on all around me, and it looks like it might rock all night.
            Tonight we have the moon to keep us company and the coyotes to howl back at us and we have the Island and that’s all we need.

 

Stella

 

 

 

 

 

           

 

 

I'm about to enter the Ninth Circle with the rest of the Island. I have to get ready to enter the Dark Wood, and I only have time to say this. This is for everyone I know and love, but especially for two women, one special friend of mine and the woman she loves. They're far away across an ocean, but they're together and they're in love.

Follow your heart, everything is linked, everything is a circle of love. And love is the only law.

Be good, everybody, and I'll see you on the other side of the woods.

Stella

Eleven random things you might not know about me. Blame my sweetie ninjastyle  for getting me to spill all this, and for posting it here. I tried to post it as a comment to her own last post but LJ wouldn't let me, so here it is....

My first real sexual encounter with a male which reached a clearly and unequivocally explosive climax (his, not mine) was an amateurish but very eager (and effective) blowjob in the back seat of my boyfriend’s dad’s Volvo wagon. That particular boyfriend was seventeen, I was thirteen and, um, advanced for my age. I learned later I could have gotten him in serious trouble for doing that with me, but I didn’t. I was having way too much fun learning how to suck cock (and telling Lucia all about it). But for not letting me cum too, oh for that alone I should have called the cops on him….

My nighttime security blanket is not a blanket, but my heaviest collar and leash. And Lucia.

I’ve lived in Colorado, California, New York City and Wyoming, in order of amount of time spent there. Only Colorado and New York City really count on that list. Those are the places I've lived with Lucia. Someday Miami or Lisbon too.

I’m closely related to a retired judge, a trial attorney, a district attorney and a state senator, but law and politics are just about the last things on earth I would ever want to be involved in as a career.

I’m distantly related through my mother to the original Gibson Girl. My mother looks a little bit like her. And I look like my mother. Find me a Gibson Girl in a bikini and there might be a resemblance.

I’m pretty good at a lot of things, but there’s one thing it just breaks my heart that I’m not better at: Singing.

I can’t drive without talking on my cell and singing along (off key) to a song on the radio at the same time. When they finally ban using cell phones in cars I’ll have to call a cab. On my cell phone. While singing. Off key.

When I was 12-13 and again at 16-17, two Sarah McLachlan songs told me more about myself than maybe any other songs I ever heard as a teenager, and both of them still give me goosebumps every single time I hear them: “Possession” and “Sweet Surrender.” And “Sweet Surrender” is still practically the national anthem of Planet Stella.

I can’t stand to be around people smoking, neither can Lucia, no one smokes here and we never go anywhere people are smoking, EVER, but lots of my favorite movies are old movies full of people smoking. Go figure.

There’s nothing in the world I love more than being read to. Someone I love holding me and reading me a story, watching her eyes, watching her lips, listening to her voice, that’s the best feeling in the whole world. Okay, sex and dancing and music and BDSM are right up there too, but being read to with love is just as good for me. Really.

Sometimes I can put out street lights. I do it by thinking “dark thoughts.” I usually don’t mean to or even realize I’m doing it, until suddenly streetlights start winking out. If I could harness this awesome power, I would use it only for good. I promise. The last time I did this that I’m aware of was in January.

Stella

 Eleven smooth white stones, and not a black stone in sight. And the New Island is made new again.

            I have not many more minutes to write this than those eleven white stones! I’ll have to leave out everything but the essentials. The Island in Star Chamber last night cast several unanimous secret ballots. Eleven white stones in a wooden box. One black stone would have stopped some plan dead in its tracks and sent it back to its sponsor for reconsideration and revision. Lucia has never had a black stone appear for one of her proposals, but she says this is not impossible or unthinkable and should never be impossible, and she told me she’ll have to try to make sure that really happens someday, just to remind everyone on the Island that no one here is bigger than the Island. I think to get a black stone in the ballot box she’d probably have to propose something like cooking Stella for supper. I’m hoping I’d get at least one vote against that proposed menu plan, but if the vote went her way? I’d jump in the crockpot and ask for more salt and pepper. (I know, I know, be careful what you wish for! I am, I promise. Besides, I trust the cook.) No black stones last night.

Yes on Lucia’s breakthrough in her evolving plans to make Zizi a provisional member of the Island and to press forward with acquiring a half share in her life and person, with the eventual goal of purchasing her in toto. (Timing and circumstances to evolve under Lucia’s leadership, and details to be arranged as they arise. More Star Chambers to come on the Question of Zizi.)

Yes on Danny and Josh successfully completing their first year as Master and slave with great distinction and honor. Yes again on Danny and Josh accepting Lucia’s collars this weekend and completing their transition into their new roles on the Island. (More on this later, but no, this will not change at all their fundamental relationship as Master and slave, and partners and lovers and best friends. And yes, Danny is still my baby brother.)

Yes on Ciara and Kelly completing their first two months as full and free and loved and absolutely indispensable members of the Island. Yes on Evie soon completing her first amazing year as a member of the Island. Two years ago we could barely even have imagined the Island growing from six to eight and then nine and eleven and now eleven-and-a-half and someday probably to twelve. Now we simply cannot imagine our family without Danny and Josh and Evie and Ciara and Kelly as an intimate part of our lives. And Zizi too.

Yes on the remodeling work going on at the other houses, Island West, and yes on Caitie and Danny’s proposal to let our contractor (“Bob the Builder”) finish the rest of the interior detailing on all three levels and get the pool in the ground before we move back in, which fits perfectly with our last big ballot issue of the night:

            Yes on the Island going on retreat at the cabin this weekend and the following week. The collaring ceremony for Danny and Josh will happen Saturday. Following that, seven slaves (of various kinds) will be inducted into the Ninth Circle for various purposes and for various periods, some of us as long as an entire week, but all in service of the overarching purpose of bonding the Island ever deeper within our circle of unbreakable trust and love and discipline and desire.

            My eleven stones’ worth of time is almost up. Lucia and I are having lunch with Ciara and Evie and Zizi, and I have to go. One more decision we made last night: I’m going to try to keep my blog alive—which is why you’re reading these words here at stelladellasera. Let me know what you think of the new look.

The new look, the old blog, my entire life in fact, all are nothing but parts of an ongoing experiment in enriching the life of the woman I belong to and who owns my entire life. The white stone of my life is nothing but a small smooth warm pebble in the palm of her hand. All I ask of life is that she never let me fall.

 

Stella

Who are the Top Tigers? WE are the Top Tigers! Me and Zizi! That's who! And WHY are we the Top Tigers? Because we rock and we roar and we rule. That's why we are the Top Tigers. Me and Zizi, Top Tigers, grrrrr. Tigers represent.

Zizi is my girlfriend for the evening. I am the lucky tiger who will be dressing her to my pleasure (and hers, and Lucia's too), and painting her beautiful eyes and mouth to match our triumphant mood, and holding the invisible leash of lust and love that will chain her to my side all evening. (Under Lucia's loving supervision.) Taking Zizi dancing tonight with the entire Island is part of our reward for being Top Tigers in our tigerplay cage match the other night. Zizi and I were the White Stripes tiger team, and we beat the legendary Baby Tigers,  Ciara and Kelly, wearing the orange and black stripes. They fought and fucked like tigers, they gave us their all and took everything we had to give, but we beat them by barely a whisker and a growl. And was our tigerrific triumph a victory of "age and cunning over youth and energy"? (Thanks, Caitie Cat.)

No it was not, thank you very much! Our victory was a triumph of fierce and fabulous coaching from our trainers (thanks to Lucia and Ronnie), our natural born feline female hotness, our sheer tigerosity which cannot be denied, my own top-tigerish leadership in the cage (and knowing exactly how to make poor Kelly cum and cum and cum), our lucky white and black tiger stripes, and my secret weapon: Zizi. The cage is one territory of Zizi's natural habitat, and in a cage she is as wild and free and fuckable and fierce as any slave I have ever known. She was the real Top Tiger in our cage match, and soon she and I will return to the cage to face the Island champion tigers, Caitie and Evie in their red and gold stripes. Thank you, O tiger goddesses! Fierceness, don't fail us now...

We just found out today that we will get to keep Zizi with us a little longer than we expected. And best of all, we now have a definite plan and a vision for her future. Zizi will be leaving us at some point, but she will be returning to us and she will be part of our lives and we will be a part of hers. We're celebrating all these things tonight and more.

Tonight is for you, Zizi! Top tigers out.

Stella

Where you're touching me (I said to her), that's where your name is written in my skin.

I know (she said). I can feel it where I wrote it. What does that mean to you, wearing my name written on your body?

Nothing can ever rub it out. Nothing can ever take it away. It means I'm yours.

You are mine. I bled as much as you with every letter. How long will you wear my name there for me?

For life.

How long will you be mine?

Forever.

Longer than my name will last written on your skin?

Your name is written on my soul (I said). That will last forever.

I know (she said). My soul wears yours. You wrote it there with your own blood. I can feel it when I touch it. I touch it every second.




Stella

The mountain will not come to the Island. (We’ve tried.) So the Island had to go to the mountains.
        We’re back home, all twelve of us. Back in town in the blazing heat after a gorgeous weekend in the mountains at our cabin, Rachel’s family’s cabin. Which is now officially the Island’s own cabin. Rachel and Caitie took it over from her folks and her brothers and their families and now it’s all ours. Rachel’s family has a bigger, newer place on a lake much closer to town where the kids have more kid things to do all summer long. Our cabin is too remote, too high, too wild, too beautiful. Too Island.
        We drank and danced and built fires and watched the skies and played hide-and-go-seek and looked for footprints in the woods and howled at the coyotes and stampeded the ponies (our own) in the big sunwashed meadow down below the ridgeline. Our baby tigers plus two spent an evening growling and squealing and loving in their improvised cage. We had a Star Chamber at midnight under the stars. We toasted marshmallows. We had the best time.
        We have a houseguest with us. Our adorable Zizi makes twelve. We’ll have to give her back to her Master soon, but we want to keep her until the last possible moment. She’s learning a lot from us and we’re learning even more from her. We thought at first she could not have arrived at a worse time for us, the middle of a very busy summer, but we were wrong, she couldn’t have arrived at a better time. Zizi is a living curriculum in some life or death lessons that we keep learning, and learning. And we love her. Ronnie and Annie and the New Girls proposed formally that the Island try to find a way for us to keep her. This may not be a realistic option, and we all know that. No one said it was realistic, we all just want it anyway. Lucia is exploring that option and some other options. Whether or not we can be her primary family someday, we told Zizi we will always be family for her and she will always have a home with us.
        We talked about the work we’re having done right now at the two houses at Island West. We like it. A lot. We talked about letting Island East be our home base for a little longer than we planned, so we can let Bob the Builder finish the interior remodeling before we move back in. Then we can watch the new pool going in together. We drank again to one of the Island’s basic principles: Wherever one of us has a roof, all of us have a home. We made some travel plans for part of the Island to go back to Portugal this fall. We love Portugal and we have a wedding to go to there! We made some breakthroughs in planning a double collaring ceremony of our own, very soon. We talked about the state of the Island. We’re in unbelievably good shape, better than ever, and we’re happy and lucky and crazy about each other and we keep surprising ourselves. We’ll drink to that. And we did.
        We did not solve the persistent and puzzling blogging crisis plaguing the Island. The crisis is not so puzzling, but the solution is a puzzle. We thought we had a possible solution a week or so ago, but Issues have been raised, and no one really has time to work on it and sort it all out. We’re tabling the blog issues until August sometime, after the double collaring, and after we send Zizi home to her new Owners. We did come home with some new interim blogging rules for me and for Caitie. These rules are from Lucia, and basically they are: Do it briefly, do it badly, bitch all you want, but do it now.
        Now I have to go back to work! We’ll be in the pool this evening. Hugs and kisses and splashes from the Island.

Stella, for the Island:

Lucia, Stella, Ronnie, Annie, Rachel, Caitie, Evie, Dannie, Josh, Ciara, Kelly (and our guest Zizi)

It's practically still the dark of the moon tonight, so why am I blogging at this late hour without a moon?

             This blog seems to run best on moonlight, and full moonlight at that. No moon tonight, nothing but stars to power this blog. I’m running on a Milky Way full of stars and Venus and Mars. And champagne. Aha! Venus and champagne and a dark midsummer night! What more do I need to celebrate?

            The Island is celebrating tonight, and the party is still swinging here. Lucia and I lit up a laptop just before midnight to check on LJ for some good news, and we found it. A friend of ours had a happy birthday tonight, a friend we sprayed some champagne for and said some very moving words for as we lifted our glasses to her. She had a happy birthday. That’s all we know and all we really needed to know.

            We’re celebrating a lot of things tonight, and Sophia’s happy birthday is one of them. We’re celebrating the New Island, again. We’ll be celebrating that every day for who knows how long. We’re celebrating Kelly and Ciara joining us, going to Miami with us, and coming out as a lesbian couple, with us beside them and all around them. One week ago. Their first week out went so supernaturally well it’s a little spooky. We’re still celebrating Kelly’s nineteenth birthday last weekend. And our first real ponyplay date between the newly enlarged Island and the new expanded Hexagon, this afternoon. Our New School ponies met their Old School ponies and went head to head and hoof to hoof--to a draw. And tomorrow is Father’s Day. The entire Island will be splitting up in many directions tomorrow to spend time with our fathers. We have some very good fathers here, and they're worth celebrating every day.

            I think what we’re really celebrating tonight is happy families. As unusual as the Island is, and we’re getting even more unusual in certain ways I haven’t even told LJ about yet, we’ve been lucky to find some other families a lot like ours. Several of them, two in particular but there are many more, families something like us who are just as happy as we are, and in ways that seem pretty familiar to us. When they’re unhappy, that usually looks pretty familiar too, and it cuts us right to our hearts. We know how much this family we’re building means to us, and we want everyone building one of these very interesting and unusual families to find happiness too. Tonight under a dark starry midsummer sky our families are happy and at peace.

            So happy birthday if it’s your birthday, and if it isn’t, happy summer solstice eve, happy Father’s Day, happy dark of the moon, and may your family be as happy as ours is tonight.

 

Stella

 

 

To my friend Sophia. She's a smart, sexy, beautiful, talented, loving, and free woman, she's been places and done things most people can only imagine in their dreams (and she will do so much more), and today she's twenty-two. She is loved and needed and admired, and although she is far away from here today, she is surrounded by love and friends and family. Love and kisses and hugs, baby, and many more happy birthdays to come, from me and all of us on the Island. We'll be spraying champagne (and a lot more than that) in your honor tonight. Happy birthday, Sophia.

Stella

So wishes come true, do they? We'll find out tomorrow. Out. That’s the key word.

Tomorrow night our new baby tigers, Ciara and Kelly, are coming out. As lesbians. As a serious committed couple. As part of a queer lesbian-run family-by-design which will support them and nurture them and protect them. As part of us.

All the way out? No! No no no. There’s out and then there’s out, and there is an outer limit of outness which none of us on the Island will probably ever attempt to reach out for. No one tomorrow will be saying the S-for-Slave Word, just for example, or the P-for-Poly Word or any of the BDSM Words or even the I-for-Island Word. (We do have a safeword set for tomorrow: “archipelago.” Any one of us so much as whispers archipelago and the Island swings into action.) Telling all your secrets can make you less free, not more, and keeping a secret can sometimes be a kind of freedom. One very good reason why slaves don't get to keep secrets from our Owners.

But some secrets make you less free. There’s an everyday level of outness that they want to claim for themselves, that we want them to have, an outness that gives you more freedom to be yourself in the world, not less. Whatever secrets anyone in the world might be hiding, and we’re all keeping some secret from somebody, aren’t we (don't tell my mom), every one of us has the right to come out and publicly claim our own sexual identity, to love whomever we love for any reason or no reason at all except love, and to tell the world who we are and who we love, proudly and without fear. To be who we are, to love who we love, to tell the world with pride. That’s as out as most of us can ever ask for. Tomorrow is Coming Out Day for our baby tigers. The Island were the very first to know their Awful Secret, years ago now, and they've been mostly out to most of their friends for months, but tomorrow is the big once-in-a-lifetime Tell The Folks Day. We’ll be right there with them to back them up. We'll be their guardian angels. (I'm passing along a thank-you to Sophia too.)

Tomorrow is Kelly’s nineteenth birthday. The Island is supplying the champagne, the very impressive cake (which I helped Annie decorate tonight), the helium balloons, and a lot of the manpower/womanpower. Her mom is supplying most of the anxiety. Not that her mom necessarily has any idea this is coming, although she really should. Moms always seem to know either a lot more or a lot less than you think. But I think just having your beautiful baby tiger turn nineteen must be reason enough for a little maternal anxiety. After dinner and before the birthday cake Kelly and Ciara will be coming out as a committed lesbian couple to their assembled parents and sisters and close friends, and all of us. (But we already know the Awful Truth about them and we still love them. Oh we love them even more.)

We have a game plan, a pre-game plan, a post-game plan, a tiny but crucial script they wrote together and we all know by heart so we can give them lines if they choke (they won't), and we have backup plans and contingency plans and plans within plans. Nothing will go wrong and everything will be good, and if anyone makes any trouble they won’t get any cake. If it all goes bad and we have to make a fast getaway, we’ll escape in a giant helium balloon and float away on a sea of champagne. (Hi Sophia! I liked that image so much I had to say it again.)

Most of this plan came together while we were in Miami. Where lots of other wishes came true. Some of them were wishes we’ve been wishing for a long time now. And others were wishes we didn’t even realize we were wishing—until they were suddenly coming true. I’ll catch you up with Miami soon. Life and work have been full to overflowing since we got home from South Beach, where the tigers came out to play. And tomorrow the tigers are coming out.

Stella

 

 

 

It's midnight and there's a full moon over Miami, and over the New Island. We are in love. We are happy and in love and dancing in the moonlight and mooning the world. I love my life! I love the people in my life. I love the moon. I love the whole world. I love the Island. I love you.

I love my life. The woman I love made the right choice when she chose me. I made the right choice too, when I chose her and sharing one life with her. I did it right! I chose this life and it was the right choice! Oh my God. How many people in the world are that lucky? How many people in the world can really say they made the right choice? Let me count: One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven. Eleven. Eleven right here on the Island. And I know a few more too. You might be one of them. Maybe tonight's the night.

Midnight and the moon is full and so is my heart. I'm feeling lucky tonight, the full moon is on my side, and I've got the power. Go outside tonight, wherever you are, look up at the full moon, if it's hiding find the bright spot in the clouds, and make a wish. Do it now! Tell the moon Stella sent you, because this moon tonight is mine. Make a wish on the full moon and chase that wish with all your heart (that part is up to you) and that wish is yours. Guaranteed, no questions asked, this special offer good tonight only, once-in-a-lifetime opportunity (no not really, there's a moon next month too), courtesy of me and the Island and the moon.

Go on! Get out there! Go make some wishes! I have to go tell the woman I love and the whole Island they've made the right choices and my wish came true. Go make a wish, I have to go, my wish is here and the moon is waiting...

Stella

Tomorrow everything will change.

            No, not everything. But yes everything. Every dawn is the same dawn, every dawn is different, no day dawns twice, every day begins with a dawn… And not tomorrow! Today! I started writing this last night and I couldn’t finish it, so today I had to go back and change this too:

            Today everything will change. Today, not tomorrow. Things will change but things will stay the same and I’m happy, I’m excited, I’m nervous, I can’t wait, I can’t sleep, I can’t stop starting things, I can’t finish anything! I’ve been trying to write something about it but I can’t. Maybe this is it, at least for today, but today everything will be changing, have you heard?

Everything in my life right now seems unfinished. Lucia keeps reminding me this is a good thing. But just for example this blog post is by my exact count the nineteenth blog post (or maybe the twentieth) I’ve started writing in the past month or so and I’ve been able to finish and post exactly two of them. If I finish this one and you’re actually reading it, this will make three. The others are huddled broken and unfinished in my flash drive, mocking me. Some of them are only a paragraph, some of them are a couple of thousand words, one of them exploded to more than five thousand words and then died, and none of them are finished.

Not finished finished, the way I always try to “finish” a blog post. Start somewhere (like the middle) and really go somewhere, not just write about what I’m wearing or going shoe shopping or what kind of cereal we had for breakfast. See where the arrow lands, score the target, close the circle, illuminate the arc, find the end of the rainbow, bring it home, catch the gleam of sunshine through the clouds. I’m always trying to do that, for me, for Lucia, for the Island, for my family, for my friends. For LJ. For Shereen. For you, Sophia. For the whole world. Most of all for Lucia. Everything I do is for her.

            Lucia says this is something she loves about me, that she could not live without what I do for her, that I’m always looking for the next rainbow to give her, even in the dead of night. And I usually find one. Sometimes the wrong one, sometimes it’s a broken one, but show me you’re hurting, tell me you need some light in your life, and I’ll find you a rainbow. I know I do that. I always try to do that. I need to do that for the ones I love. I don’t know why. No, I do know why. Lucia knows too. But I know I drive people crazy with it sometimes. Caitie says I used to drive her out of her mind trying to cheer her up and make her laugh when all she wanted to do was wallow in her delicious teenage redhead despair, her bed awash in sex and angst and her lovely Celtic twilight gloom. I always made you laugh, baby, was that so bad? (It’s okay, my Caitie Cat forgave me long ago. She’s laughing most of the time now, but that’s more up to Rachel and Evie than it is to me. But I always try to help too. Anybody need a rainbow?)

Lucia says this is why Caitie and I have always been able to write so many great bad sonnets together, or maybe such bad great sonnets together. We used to fight like cats and then lick and make up. (Now we just lick and make up. And lick and lick and...) A sonnet is an argument in verse, and Caitie and I have never been at a loss for arguments, in verse or worse, off and on, until a couple of years ago, when the Island started happening and suddenly we were on the same team and the catfighting was (mostly) over. When we were in high school and college we used to write lots of things together, partly Lucia’s idea to keep us from killing each other, and Caitie was forever ripping some dark gloomy tormented perfect octave from the midnight of her teenage soul and beating me over the head with it. I would grab it away from her and race her for the turn, the volta, and my sparkling little sestet would slap her big sullen octave silly and rip open the curtains and tear away the clouds and hold it up to the light and let in the sun! And laugh! And then Caitie would grab my bright sunny sestet away from me and try to strangle it with doom and darkness, and we’d end up having a knife fight to the death over our poor tortured schizophrenic half-sun half-shade couplet, and they call it a terminal couplet because someone gets killed writing it. We would die in each other’s arms in a lurid orgy of sun and shadow and sex. And purple fountain pen ink. I wonder if Caitie knew I had the same dark shadows hidden inside me that she used to wear on her sleeve, and that’s why I was always desperately seeking sunshine, and I still am. She knows now. And Lucia has always known.

            But my shadows are all dappled full of light now and I know where the dark comes from and where it goes and yet I still can’t finish anything right now! And I get sidetracked talking about sonnets from out of the past and then I don’t even show you the stupid sonnet! Maybe later, if I can wrestle one away from the Caitie Cat, she’s the Cat-Clawed Keeper of the Great Bad Sonnets. I think maybe I’m having a hard time finishing anything I try to write, except for the office, where I have deadlines, because everything feels so unfinished all around me, everything is in transition, me, Lucia, the Island, our lives, our jobs, our family. The Island.

            The Island. Everything on the Island will change tomorrow, no wait, today! And nothing will change. The Island will finally officially grow to eleven tonight. Ciara and Kelly will make eleven of us. They are joining us as free partners and we are more complex now than just Owners and slaves, we are a constitutional monarchy of eleven citizens, women and men, couples and triples, all equal and united before the Crown, our Queen, Lucia, and equal in love and life and rights but lovingly unequal in power and authority and privilege. Eleven of us as of tonight, the free and unowned and unowning and those who own others and those who are lovingly owned, like me. And those who might someday become either Owner or owned, or perhaps never, but the love will be there no matter what, and the Island. Always. After almost a year of talking and arguing and laughing and theorizing and revising, after the Island was torn down to sticks and stones in the middle of a hurricane and rebuilt newer and stronger as the New Island, Insula Nova, after three months of bringing the New Girls cautiously into the New Island step by step, circle by circle, arc by arc, and that isn’t usually the Island Way, usually we just throw you in the deep end of the pool and jump in after you laughing, and oh yeah, we’re planning on doing that tonight too. But this spell has been crafted and cast so carefully. We love these girls, we treasure them as part of our own hearts. We want them to be part of our family and our home for a lifetime, and they are younger than we are and we have special responsibilities toward them and they are placing themselves in our hands and giving us their love and their trust, so we have been looking for every rainbow and illuminating every shadow and smoothing every stone in the path. But tomorrow today everything will change.

            Tonight will be the rite of passage, the initiation ceremony, the ritual we’ve been putting together in bits and pieces for weeks now, the mud, the blood, the earth wind and fire and the deep end of the pool, the vows and the rings and the ribbons and the champagne. Eleven elements to bind the eleven of us together and eleven acts of love and trust and commitment to share and eleven white stones in a wooden box, and then the Island will be eleven forevermore. Blood will be part of it. There Will Be Blood, as I just told my friend Shereen, but more than that, oh much more: There Will Be Boobs. And there will be booty too and there will be love and lust and pleasure and pain and did I mention champagne? We’ll party till dawn and then we’re leaving.

            Spring break! We’re flying to Miami in the morning for spring break! Yes, I know we’re a little late. We all missed spring break this spring, one way or another, and we all really desperately need a spring break, so all eleven of us are flying to Miami Saturday morning. Yeah, I know the rest of the cool kids have come and gone. More South Beach for us, dudes. We’ll be celebrating Caitie and Rachel’s second do-it-yourself-wedding anniversary, Kelly’s nineteenth birthday (a little early), the official end of Island Birthday Season, the New Island growing to eleven, the Island period, and a couple of other big events that are still secrets and surprises right now. I think there might even be a bad sonnet or two involved. Probably lots of sun and sand and rain and dancing and champagne. And sex. There has to be sex. I’ll even sit through all the great bad sonnets, even the bad ones I write, as long as there’s great sex. And we will celebrate finishing something and beginning something.

            We have a toast we say sometimes on the Island. No one invented this, it just seemed to happen, or maybe we stole it. Someone raises a glass and says, “To happy endings!” And the rest of us raise our glasses and say, “And happy beginnings.” Because every happy ending is just a happy beginning in disguise.

            That’s how I’m finally going to finish this: To happy endings and happy beginnings. To the Island. To all the ones I love, near and far: This is where the rainbow ends. And begins.

Stella

 

 

Not every dream can come true.
         Really? This is not the sort of thing you usually hear coming from me, is it? I’m always the one saying, Make a wish on the evening star and may all your dreams come true! Aren’t I? Yeah, that’s me, all right, stelladellasera, Stella with the starry eyes. I haven’t lost my dreams. I’m still dreaming and I’m still handing out wishes on stars, but please turn that wish over and read the fine print on the little label before you press play: Not every dream comes true.
         Every love, every relationship, every human arrangement of love, lust and hope, is a dream. A vision of the world as it might be or ought to be or you hope it could be. Every time you fall in love with someone or try to build a relationship with someone or more than one someone, what you’re really doing is saying, This is how the world should be! I should love her, she should love me! Or maybe her and her and her and him and them and they should all love me! Listen up, World! This is the plan! The one(s) I love should give me her heart and her life and all her love and I should give her mine, because that’s our dream, and the world should give us room to love, give us the time and space and understanding to build our dream life together. Our love should be the center of the world, our own world. Love builds little worlds out of hope, and every world is a dream. But not every dream can come true.
         When a couple you care about break up, it destroys the whole world. Or it feels that way. One little world, anyway, their own little world, and it rattles your world too. If their dream can’t come true, what went wrong with the world? They’re both my friends, I care about them, we’ve shared so many things, we’re alike in so many ways, I want them both to be happy. If they can’t be happy together and their world is falling apart, what does that mean? Could my world crumble too? When things go wrong with a couple in love it makes you wonder. It makes you cry, for them, for their dream, and maybe for yourself. What would it be like to go through what they’re going through right now? What if you lost the woman you love? It would be like losing the whole world.
         I’ve been there. You have too. Everyone has gone through a bad break up with someone they still loved, or who still loved you, or both. Sometimes it’s no one’s fault. It’s not because you don’t love each other anymore. It might be because you love each other too much, or not in the same way, or not in the right way. It might be life, your life or your two or more lives pulling you apart. You’ve tried and tried, but it doesn’t work anymore. The dream has failed. What went wrong? Maybe you shared one dream that split into two very different dreams, or your two dreams once thought they were the same dream, but now they’ve grown in two different directions. Now your world is trying to contain two very different dreams that wanted so much to be together, but now they can’t possibly exist simultaneously in the same time and space. Like matter and anti-matter. Light and darkness. Fire and ice. Freedom and slavery. Love and--love. It doesn’t matter that all the love is still there, there’s no there left for the love to live in. It breaks your heart. It’s like walking through a nightmare. It’s like a dream dying.
         No, not me. My world is not falling apart. Not me and Lucia. No one on the Island is breaking up or in trouble. No one here even has a zit. Okay, maybe one zit, and a little sunburn. We’re growing and thriving, our dreams are coming true. We have wishes to share and sunshine to spare and stars to scatter like diamond dust. I have a woman in my life who is the moon and the stars and the sun to me. She’s my whole world. Not because I’m so smart. Me? Smart mouth, smart ass, smarty pants, too smart for my own good maybe, but I’m not that smart. I got lucky. I know how lucky I am. I made an impossible wish for an unbelievable dream and pressed play and it came true. It’s still coming true.
         But all of us here have had dreams that did not come true. You have too. Dreams that could not come true, that should not have come true, that would have turned out to be nightmares. I think that’s true of everyone in the world, but I’ll speak only for the Island. I know us the best. And it’s because of those dreams that did not come true that we’re living the dreams we’re living today. Every single one of us: A doomed dream had to die so the right dream could live.
         To build the Island, relationships died, dreams died, loves died, lovers died, whole worlds crumbled into dust. Failed relationships, first loves, lost loves, ex-girlfriends and ex-boyfriends, exes for good reasons (for Ciara, Kelly, Danny, Josh). Everyday dreams, with what turned out to be the wrong people: We’ve all been there. A serious and creative but damaging four-way love affair (for Ronnie and Annie) with another female couple, who broke up and dissolved into craziness and self-destruction. A dangerous dream. Broken formal engagements (Rachel’s, Caitie’s, Lucia’s) to the wrong partners, very wrong partners and good God men of all things, complete with church dates and wedding invitations and cake reservations and white dresses and diamond rings. Deceptive dreams, false dreams. A doomed marriage (mine) to a guy I never should have married and a vicious divorce that couldn’t be over fast enough. A really dumb dream. A lost once-in-a-lifetime chance (mine again) to belong to the only man I ever loved, but who was not the woman who is the love of my life (see above, the “getting lucky” part). The wrong dream, so close but so far away from being the right dream. The sudden death of a beautiful but very troubled lover and partner (Eva’s) who died way too young. A wild rollercoaster ride of a dream cut short. All these dreams apparently had to die so each of us could find the right dream, the one we were each meant to live. And so the Island could be born and grow and become what it’s becoming, a home and a family for all eleven of us. A place where all our dreams have a pretty good chance of coming true.
         Dreams live on hope. Sometimes when a dream runs out of hope it has to die, so another dream can be born and take its place. Maybe the right dream is right around the corner, waiting for the old dream to make room. Sometimes breaking up is the right thing for a couple to do, maybe sometimes it’s the only thing to do, the thing that breathes the most hope into the world for both of them, even though there’s so much pain you feel like the world is coming to an end. One little world does come to an end, but at least two new worlds and maybe more take its place and grow. And new dreams and new loves renew the whole world.
         Not every dream can come true. But there are new summer stars out tonight, and tonight I’m wishing for brand-new dreams to come true for two people I care about very much. Whatever those new dreams turn out to be for you in your new lives, I want you both to be happy. That’s the wish I’m wishing tonight. For both of you.

Stella

It’s the moon. Caitie is right. We’ve gotten stuck on the full moon. She’s always right, except sometimes when she’s wrong, and Caitie can always count on me being around to remember those times for her. No need to thank me, Caitie Cat, just part of the service! But really I can’t remember the last time she was wrong about something important. Caitie is one of my heroes.
         We’re stuck on the moon, she says, and she’s right. She and I can’t quite seem to write a blog post anymore unless it’s a full moon or close to a full moon, so these days we haven’t been writing much more than once a month. A month! I used to feel hopelessly blocked if I didn’t post at least a couple of times a week! My blog is as dead as a tumbling tumbleweed. Caitie’s blog at kissmecaitlin  has wilted like a dying houseplant. We’re both twenty-eight now, Caitie turned twenty-eight yesterday (HAPPY BIRTHDAY AGAIN, CAITIE CAT!), and on the Island we’ve decided twenty-eight is the new eighteen, but here we are at twenty-eight going on eighteen and we are younger than springtime, but we’re saddled with these dead or dying blogs hanging around our necks like albatrosses.
         We both sat down in front of the fireplace Friday night to write blog posts while everyone else was watching a movie we know by heart. Caitie managed it, but I didn’t, not quite: Not enough moon. We barely saw the moon all weekend, it rained most of the time, so naturally I couldn’t write: Not enough moon. (And too much fun. Too many birthdays and Mothers Days and too much Island. But too much Island is never enough.) But tonight there might be just barely enough moon, so I’m trying again. If I run out of moonlight, you’ll never see this post by daylight.
         Friends on LJ have been emailing and nudging and wondering and worrying if we’re all right and hoping we’re not as dead as our blogs. We’re not dead, but we’re having a serious blogging crisis, Caitie and I, and we’re seeking a government bailout for starving bloggers. Will blog for billions! But even billions wouldn’t make us blog. We can only blog for the moon. Caitie says this is very female of us, very menstrual, this lunar tidal blogging and bleeding period we’re going through. I think we’re just moonstruck.
         We have very good reasons for not blogging. We’ve been busy, guys, too busy living to blog. Living beats blogging, right? And what this blog and my Caitie Cat’s blog are really starving for is not billions of taxpayer dollars, but time. Things have been set in motion that will soon give us even less time to do things like writing blogs. If we’re going to keep blogging, we’re gonna need a lot more moonlight. At least a couple of moons per month.
         There’s another reason I’ve gotten stuck on the moon. The full moon helped save my life a few months ago. The moon helped Lucia save my life, and my life began again on a night of a full moon in January. Part of me is only four months old. Lucia did most of the work, but the moon helped. So did I. Every full moon reminds me of that weekend when my life as I know it nearly ended and then… Then it began again. Because Lucia found a way to save my life. Because she found a way to make me want to save my own life. Because the moon was watching me, and I wanted to see the moon again, with Lucia by my side. Every full moon reminds me. I hope the moon and Lucia will be watching over me for the rest of my life, and I want to live forever.
         I’m doing it again! Mooning away! The moon is so not what I meant to write about tonight. The only things I ever blog about anymore are Lucia and the Island and the moon. Tonight I want to say something about me.
         I’m all right. I’m home, I’m happy, I’m healthy and I’m in love. I’m good. I’m better than I’ve ever been before. I’m in the very best and strongest and sweetest relationship of my entire life. I’m not the center of the world the moon revolves around, but I’m the most important thing in the world to one person in the world, the woman who is the whole world to me. I’m surrounded by people I love who love me, and we’re building a family. It’s not quite like any other family we’ve ever heard of, close but not quite, but it’s strong and happy and growing and evolving. We have powerful forces in our lives that will try to tear us apart, like any family, but we also have even more powerful forces that will keep us together. Like love. Other things too, but love most of all. I belong here, with this woman and this family, and nothing will ever take me away from them.
         My life is nothing the moon did. I’m just one little star in the starry night. The moon just reminds me of how lucky I am to be here tonight, watching the moon. The moon and I are both part of the beautiful and mysterious symmetry of this world. Someone saved my life under a full moon, because she loves me. I saved my own life and gave it to her to keep, because I love her. And the moon was watching.
         I always make a wish on the evening star, whenever I can see her. The stars have been good to me, even when I’ve been looking up at them from the gutter. Tonight I’m wishing on the moon. The moon is my special friend tonight. I want to stand on this beautiful world looking up at the moon for a very long time, hand in hand with the woman I love and the family we’re part of. That’s my wish. I’m counting on the moon to keep watching over me. I’ll do my part.

Stella

The full moon is playing peekaboo behind the clouds tonight. It is so beautiful here. We’re all out on the deck above the pool at Rachel’s place watching the moon, but we were in the pool earlier tonight, just to prove to ourselves that it really is fucking spring and not still fucking winter. And now we’re bundled up in fleece, fleece over bikinis and fleece over nothing at all, fleece over fleece some of us, and it’s cool and windy here tonight! But oh so beautiful, with the moon sliding behind the clouds and suddenly flaring out so big and round and pure white between ragged streaming clouds like a silver apple shining in God’s eye and we all go OOOH just like fireworks on the Fourth of July.…
    Is it so crazy to love the place you live so much? The place where you were born and raised and grew up and met the love of your life? If it is then I’m crazy. I’m so full of love tonight. Drunk on the moon, Caitie says, as we were spinning and spinning and falling into the pool while the big orange moon was rising through the trees and spilling gold all over the Great Plains and over the endless wheatfields far away to the east of us and over Highway 36 and Last Chance, Colorado, which had its last chance long ago and rolled the dice and lost. But sometimes in the moonlight I think of that ice cream cone my daddy bought me in Last Chance at the long-gone Dairy King there, long ago one evening when I was a little girl and the moon was rising over the plains and the moon was the biggest brightest highest thing I’d ever seen, even bigger than my ice cream cone. But the moon isn’t really so high. Cows can jump right over it, did you know?
    I’m writing this out on the deck in the silver half dark of the moonlight on Rachel’s sexy new silver MacBook Pro with the backlit keyboard, which is exactly as great as she says it is, almost as great as sex on the beach, and oh my God, Lucia, how did we ever live without a MacBook with a backlit keyboard? One of these beautiful things for us soon too Lucia, please? And Kelly is here tonight, hugging my shoulders and watching me write this and there right there she giggled when she saw her name! Hi Kell! She drove down from school at Boulder to see our fabulous moonlight, she said she heard we had the best moonlight in town. Her Ciara called to tell us Kell was coming and she wasn’t, because of school, not till tomorrow, but Stellie listen to me she said listen please my Kelly has such a crush on you and Lucia she loves you so and I can’t be there tonight so please love her to pieces for me and suck the flesh right off her bones and eat her all up till morning but save her heart for me, please Stellie, you know what I mean if anyone in the whole world knows what I mean, please please please save her heart for me?
    And I do know, Ciara, I do know what you mean and I nearly choked up right there on the phone, she suddenly sounded so much like her big sis Caitie and yet she’s so much herself and so perfect and I love them both! Yes I love you too, Kell, now stop wiggling baby or I’ll never finish writing this! Go tell Lucia what I’m writing about, tell her it’s the moonlight. Welcome to the Island babies, and Ciara please don’t worry, we’ll keep your baby safe and warm and loved till morning and we’ll save her heart for you. That’s something the Island knows how to do, that’s part of what we’re here for, for each other. If you’re one of us we can love you to pieces and eat you alive till dawn’s early light and then hand you back to the love of your life with your heart all hers and in one piece and polished better than new and shining brightly like the moon. Don’t worry, Kell and Ciara, on the Island by moonlight love may wander far and near, but hearts have homes. Hearts have homes.
    This is my home. This is where my heart lives. This city, this place, these two houses, this deck and this pool and this garden. I love this place, I love these women and these men, I love the woman I belong to, and I watch Lucia laughing in the moonlight with the Island and they are like goddesses and spirits all sprinkled with silver and magic under the moon. I fall in love with them all and I fall into the moon.
    This is something I’ve been trying to find the words to talk about, and the moon and Lucia’s eyes say this might be the night. The moon and Lucia tell me I need to tell why my heart is so full of moonlight tonight. Lucia and the moon saved me on a full moon night just like this very night.
    No one can love her home this much unless she’s been far away from home and thought she might have lost her home forever. Unless she’s discovered she left her heart behind when she left her home. Unless she returned home to find it waiting for her. And I have been far away from home and wondering where my heart went. More than once. Once I married a man whose face I can barely remember and when I look at his picture today I wonder who on earth that guy was and what was I thinking. I lived far away with this strange man I could barely see and I dreamed every night of the one face I could never forget. I have stood on the edge of a cliff trying to find the courage to throw it all away, my home, my heart, my life, and only one hand reached out to save me and make me hers and take me home with her, where my heart was. I have been buried deep in the bowels of the earth in this very garden, out in the moonlit shadows beyond the pool, and I knew that night, because Lucia told me so, that night if took one more step down into the depths of Hell I would never come back. I would have lived my life blind and silent and in chains forever more as a half-human shadow, a blind pony stumbling chained in darkness. I would never again see Lucia’s face laughing in the moonlight.
    It was the night of a full moon in January when she took me down there. You know where. Call it whatever you want, where a blind pony sleeps alone in the shadows. Three full moons ago. When she finally uncovered my face that night for one single hour the moon was so bright it seemed to sear my eyes. I knew that moon and Lucia’s eyes might be the last bright things I would see. The last things I would ever see. She told me so. She told me everything in our future life together now depended on me, but the final decision would be hers. She said we would share everything, no matter what happened, no matter what she decided, but to make her decision she needed to know what was in my heart that night, darkness or light. She offered me both. I had been telling her, in many different ways, that I needed the darkness, wanted the darkness, begged for the dark. Here it was. Deeper and darker than I could ever have imagined. I had to go there to believe it could be so dark.
    I knew exactly what she was telling me. She wanted me back with her by her side, but she needed me to want it just as much as she did. She wanted me back with all her heart. Did I want that too? Did I want it badly enough? She wanted me to know what my choice would really mean, to feel the endless darkness stretching out ahead of me forever and to know that at the very bottom of the pit I would be alone, locked up safe in her keeping but forever alone in the dark. She wanted me to choose light, and life, and her. The final choice would be hers, but before she could choose I would have a chance to make my own choice, if I could. Perhaps my last choice as a human being.
    Was that night really my last chance? I thought it was. I was right to think that, it helped me make my choice, but I know now it wasn’t. Lucia told me later she would never have given up on me, she would have kept trying to save me from the darkness inside me for the rest of her life and mine, if that’s what it took, and I know that’s true. I would have had a second chance, and a third, and more. But Lucia found the right way to make me choose, and I chose the light. Three full moons ago when she finally let me speak and she asked me who I was and what I thought my name should be forever after, I said I wanted to be Stella, her Stella. Not her Shadow. I begged her to please take me home with her and let me live again as the woman I am, the woman she loves and owns, the woman I was meant to be. I begged her not to keep me chained in the dark as the shadow of a poor blind pony for the rest of my life. Even though not so very long before that night I had been begging her and begging her to do exactly that. Who saved me? Lucia saved me, Lucia and the moonlight and maybe even the Shadow helped save me a little too, and when it was all over Lucia took me home.
    And here I am, in the last of the moonlight! Surrounded by the people I love. Home, where my heart lives, with the woman I love. Hearts have a home, and my home is here.
    I’m running out of moonlight and running out of time tonight, but wherever you are this night, try to remember that place where your heart says, This is my home. Wherever it is, whether it’s the place where you grew up, or the place where you’ve made a new home for yourself, or the arms of someone you love. If you’re home tonight with the ones you love, like me, hold them tight and tell them how much you love them. If you’re far away from home, go there in your heart and make a wish...and may that wish carry you home. Wishes tonight are on the house, courtesy of the moon…and the Island…and Stella, your evening star.

Stella

I know a secret. Lucia called a surprise Star Chamber on the Island last night, the nine of us, so she could tell us a secret and get the Island’s feelings and ideas and see what we might be able to learn from it. Only nine of us because Ciara and Kelly are at school, and the Island is not officially eleven quite yet, not until next month. The nine of us were all together anyway, but we weren’t expecting a Star Chamber, just dinner and drinks and the pool and a movie and the full moon and the usual Island festive spring frivolities.
    This family meeting wasn’t about Vermont and Iowa or Ciara and Kelly or Easter weekend or our next big trip together or the next round of Island spring birthday parties or maybe going to Italy to see Dante and Francesca or maybe Dante and Francesca visiting us here soon or Angel in Virginia having her baby very soon or the sweet little big secret we know about Maravilha and a few other women we know or even about me. All of those things ended up getting talked about last night (except me—no wait, I got talked about too, and I don’t even have any secrets), but that wasn’t the main order of business. The only particularly surprising thing going on with us right now is our New Girls, Ciara and Kelly, and how well everything is going so far with them joining the Island. They’re like a birthday present that keeps unwrapping itself and revealing another new present, one layer of pretty wrapping at a time. But this wasn’t about them. This Star Chamber was mostly about a surprising secret Lucia wanted to share with us.
    A secret I will not be sharing here! Sorry. This is not our secret to share. A surprising thing has been going on elsewhere, among some friends of ours in a family something like ours. The surprising thing Lucia told us about is perhaps really not so surprising after all, we all realized, but still! Wow! A surprising adventure full of, well, surprises! And with the promise of more surprises yet to come. Well, it’s no surprise that surprises happen in the best of families.
    Lucia had promised confidentiality, as one head of a family to another, and she wasn’t at liberty to tell the Island, until last night. And I knew it, I knew there was something she really wanted to tell me about but she wasn’t telling me about! Lucia is incredibly good at keeping secrets when she wants to, even from me, but I am universally recognized as the leading Luciologist on this planet (sorry, Caitie Cat, you know it's true), and I knew she was keeping some kind of a secret about something happening somewhere! I even had a rough idea where this secret was happening, I just had no idea what it really was! But now that she was free to tell us, she said she thought we needed to know about this and that it was relevant to us in certain ways and we’d find some things in this, ahem, surprising turn of events to talk about, and oh my God did we have things to talk about! We talked all night and blew off the movie and ended up just talking and dancing and watching the full moon, and talking, till it was time to do other things and then it was time for bed. And some of the things we talked about last night are secrets too.
    All I really want to say here, to the handful of people in the world who have a clue in the world what I’m talking about and who might possibly chance to read this, is this:
    We wish you all the best. All of you. We aren’t taking any sides as a family, that would be pointless and unfair. We all have sympathies and concerns on every side and in every direction for everyone involved and we just want everything to work out so everyone can be as happy as you can possibly be. That’s it. Okay, we are taking sides, we’re on the side of happiness. No surprise there. Oh, and on the side of love and slavery and owners and lovers and slaves and freedom and commitment and peace and harmony and family and couples and triples and multiples and more, and most of all love.
    But love is like, you know, a many-splendored, um, thing, dudes. Right? That’s from an old song, so it must be true. And a many-sided thing and a many-dimensioned thing that many of us can give and take in many different ways with many different people at the same time, and some of those different loves can sometimes push us together and pull us apart in many different directions, all at the same time. Lucia says it looks like there might be a possible solution that might let all of these many kinds of love pull together and find a way to balance all the various pushes and pulls and restore peace for everyone. And that’s all we’re hoping for. Peace and happiness and the best for everyone. Just in time for spring.
    And spring will come, no matter what we do, and spring is always the same, but always a surprise. Like the full moon. And like something else I know something about. But that’s a secret.

Stella

And YAY VERMONT too! If Iowa and Vermont can do it, and Massachusetts and Connecticut and California (and yes, I know California undid it, but we're all hoping they can undo the undoing of it and redo it once and for all), and probably soon even New Hampshire, why oh why can't Colorado do it? Why can't the whole country do it, and the whole world? We can do it, and someday we will. But for the moment, hurray for Iowa and Vermont! You did it!

Stella

PS Someday Lucia and I will do it too...

“If you did,” I began. A little wistfully, I think. I couldn’t help it. The wanting, or the wistfulness. “If you did ever want that, Lucia? If you took me there to stay? I mean, if you ever really wanted that?” I am always a little wistful for a little while when someone we know gets to go there for longer than I usually get to go there. Wistful and fearful at the same time. Envy and dread. Terror and delight. The usual mad whirl.

Where is there? I don’t want to give it a name. Names are dangerous. When we talk about it here, we tend to talk about it more often in ambiguous verbs and adverbs and adjectives, not so much nouns: Time for us to go there. I’m going to take you down deep this weekend. I heard she’s going under for a while. Did you hear she’s getting locked in, maybe for a couple of weeks? Oh baby I am so going to take you there.... “I know this probably won’t happen, but if it ever did…”

This is silly, names are better, there’s nothing to be afraid of in a name, is there? We use these names all the time, why is tonight so charged with envy and dread? I don’t know, it just is. And there isn’t just one place, it’s a lot of very different places in very different lives. If you’re a slave and you know the place or places I’m talking about, you and your Owner have a name for it. Maybe more than one. I know some of them. Some of these are yours, some of them are ours.

Level Zero. Condition Black. The Red Room. The Other World. The Underworld. The Dance. The Dark. The Darkness. The Dungeon. The Box. The Cage. The Well. The Pit. The Circus. The Zoo. The Zone. The Night Kitchen. The Shadow. Shadowland. The Iron Curtain. The Chateau. Cunt Mode. Cuntopia. Toyland. The Ponyfarm. Ponyland. Ponyworld. The Blind Pony. Wonderland. Nowhere. The Dark Wood. The Ninth Circle. Inferno, Purgatorio, Paradiso. On Beyond Zebra. Through The Looking-Glass. Where The Wild Things Are. Heaven. Hell.

Different names for different places that are all connected, somewhere beyond the horizon. But when I get wistful and teary-eyed about it, it means there’s one thing all these places have in common: Someone I know is going there to stay for a while, and I’m not. Not tonight anyway. We go there all the time. But we never stay there long enough. Not long enough for some of us, anyway.

If I talk about it in just the right way, it’s all right. The key word is if. I said if. If I remember to say if and if I say it in just the right way, then I can talk about it for a little while without being an idiot and getting all choked up. Without making Lucia cry too. Without crossing the line. The line into wanting to go there, just because someone else I know is going there. I don’t want to go there forever. I don’t even want to want it unless Lucia wants it too. But sometimes I can’t help thinking about what if…

            “If you really did take me there, Lucia? If you ever wanted to? For good? And you wanted me to stay there? In a cage. Or in a dungeon. Or in a pony stall. Wherever you wanted me to be. For life. Except when you take me out to use me or play with me or run me or whip me or show me off or share me or take care of me, like right now, and my God Lucia that feels wonderful, please don’t stop, if you wanted to do that to me I would be okay with that, you know I would, if you really wanted it. All I would need to know is that it’s what you want. And if I did go there, maybe…”

            “Maybe what, baby?” Gently. As if I were talking about where to go for the weekend. Her voice in my ear is as soft as the wind past the bedroom window blowing the spring stars across a blue velvet sky. The way she would talk to a baby, her baby. I am her baby. She’s brushing my hair, so gently, holding me so tight, so gently, rubbing my wrists and ankles where the cuffs rest. She’s getting me ready for bed. She’s just brushed my teeth with me handcuffed in the bathroom after our shower. God I adore that, Lucia brushing my teeth, every single time, it’s better than sex, no no no it is sex, it’s an incredibly intimate and submissive kind of sex just getting your teeth brushed by your Owner while you stand there at the sink in your chains wiggling and rattling and squirming and almost cumming in sheer surrender as she holds my head and peers intently into my open sudsy mouth and her toothbrush whirs away and she kisses my minty-fresh lips and tongue covered with toothpaste and oh God I love that. Now I’m kneeling on the bed, posture perfect, eyes bright, ready for her to put me down for the night and hold me all night long. Slave reporting for duty in the Night Kitchen, Ma’am!

I’m already all clean and naked and moisturized and fucked and spanked and pottied and plugged and collared in my new heavy collar, the collar that still takes my breath away every time I feel it lock shut around my throat, and my new cuffs and ankle shackles and chains. I’m handcuffed behind my back, my ankles are chained to the foot of the bed, my collar is padlocked to a heavy shiny chain padlocked to the head of the bed. I’m going to be chained to the bed tonight. I am clean and clear and happy and hers, but I need to say this. I asked for permission to speak. I always need permission when I’m in chains, but she usually lets me, until my gag goes in, and she did and here I am. I feel like an idiot. And of all the things I should be writing about today, what made me start writing about this? Oh. Right. Someone we know going there. And not me.

She knew I needed this to be a chain night before I did. This was the other night I’m talking about, but last night was the same, but then we woke up and she unlocked me and we got up in the middle of the night and went out on the deck and checked the web and LJ and talked and talked. About the same things, mostly. Probably a chain night tomorrow night too. I always need to be chained up whenever someone we know is going there and I’m not. It’s for my own good. Especially since January, when she took me there, really took me there, and brought me back alive, more alive than ever, but knowing more than ever about wherever it was that we went. It’s part of, oh what should I call it, names are dangerous you know, let’s not pick a name, let’s just call it part of the legacy of that damned blind pony, and Lucia knows all about this, she knows this better than anyone, even better than me. I tend to forget about it until it hits me, I’m just trotting happily along and then I trip and fall, but Lucia is always there first, waiting for me. Ready to catch me in mid air. “Maybe what, Stell?” She knows exactly which maybe I’m talking about. Eva was just telling us before bedtime about our friend Gry going into Level Zero for her Owner.

            “Maybe I could give you even more? More than I do now? I know I try to give you everything I can, Lucia, but if you took me there maybe I could give you even more? Every second, every breath, every beat of my heart, I would live for you, I would die for you, there would be nothing in my life but you, just you and waiting for you, just you and thinking about you nothing but you serving you living for you and in your pony stall as your pony I would be nothing at all nothing in the world except your pony your property serving you and waiting for you and worshiping you and that would be all there would be of me and I could do that forever if you wanted that if you really wanted that if you ever did…” Yes, all in a rush. Without even taking a breath. Yes, I’m in free fall and the air is rushing past me on the way down. A long pause before she says anything. She brushes my hair and looks down into my eyes. They’re starting to fill up, I don’t know why, I said it right, I remembered to say if.

            “But you give me everything now, Stell. Every breath, every thought, every beat of your heart. I know you do, baby. I feel you doing it.”

            “But what if there were less of me, Lucia? Less in the way? Nothing but your slave? What if you could cut away and throw away all the nonessential parts of me, all the parts that don’t mean anything, that aren’t about serving you? Then I could, I don’t know, maybe I could fill that space up with more love for you? More surrender to you? More complete focus on you? On nothing but you?” She’s smiling. She’s not sad that I’m saying this. She understands. She’s letting me say all this, she knows I need to say it, I don’t know why I need to say this again, how many times is it now, but tonight I need to. She’s listening so carefully. The way she always does. She hasn’t kissed me and put my ball gag in my mouth for the night yet.

            “What parts of you would you cut away?”

            “All the crap that goes on in my head all the time! All the junk that isn’t about being your slave! All the nothing that fills up my life and pulls me away from you. You know. Shoes. Shoes and clothes and makeup and hair and beauty and fashion and Paris Fashion Week. Work. Work work work. All the stupid things I say all day long to all those stupid people on the phone. All the stupid things in my head that have nothing to do with you. I could get rid of all of it, if you wanted me to, if you said the word. Music and dancing and friends and movies and books and Vogue and Allure and What Not To Wear and my stupid blog and where the best bars are in Lisbon and how much airfare is to Miami and what silly thing my mother said today and everything but being your slave. That’s all I need to be. You’re the center of my world but it’s so cluttered up sometimes with so much other stuff and all there should be in my world is you! I could give you so much more, Lucia, so much more, if all that stuff were out of my life and I was living just for you in your cage your stall your bed, wherever you put me is where I belong! I want to live just for you! You could take me there anytime you wanted, I know all the things we’ve said and done and planned but if you ever wanted us to go there all you would have to do is say Stella it’s time and I would be ready to go! That very minute! I would know wherever I would be I would be right where you want me every second doing exactly what you want me to do and being exactly what you want me to be and if you were with me I’d be totally focused on you and serving you and not thinking of a thing in the world except you and if I were locked up in my cage all alone while you did whatever you wanted to do that didn’t include me I would still know I was locked up right where you wanted me and I would be totally focused on you every second so it would be like being with you all the time even if you left me locked up as a pony for the rest of my life and never let me out again and it would be so wonderful so wonderful so wonderful if this could ever happen please let me give you this someday Lucia please…”

She lifts my face to look into my eyes, her hand cradling my chin, her other hand on my breast, touching my mouth, the back of my neck, buried in my hair. She kisses me to fill my mouth with something besides my stupid words. Idiot words. Idiot me. I close my eyes. There, that did it, they finally fill up and overflow. Right down both cheeks. With no hands to wipe my face. Why did I start this? Where did that if go, if was all that was keeping me from falling off this cliff again, this is so stupid, why can’t I help going where I know I really don’t want to go and she doesn’t want me to go but something keeps dragging me off this cliff into thin air—

“Lucia, Mistress, Ma’am, I’m so sorry, I didn’t mean to go there again, this is so silly of me, all I want to be is what you want me to be and it’s not up to me I just have all these things bursting out of me again all of a sudden and I’m so sorry.”

“Baby, don’t be sorry. You’re telling me what you’re feeling. Your feelings are real things and you have to tell me everything. I need to know everything you’re feeling. Now, tell me what parts of you I should cut away. I’ll go get the big knife from the kitchen.” She’s smiling, not getting the knife.

“I don’t know, I don’t know, it’s just that I feel like there’s so much junk inside me and all there should be inside me is you, nothing but you. Too much me, stupid me.”

“You want me to throw away all the nonessential parts of you? Which parts are those, baby? All the parts of you that I keep by my side every day and every night?” Her voice so warm in my ears. Her eyes an inch from mine. Oh God I love her. She’s wiping my eyes, licking the tears off my cheeks, kissing my wet lips. “You serve me all day at the office, Stella, all day, every day, I couldn’t get through my day there without you. You are absolutely indispensable to me. Would you want me to cut that part of you away and keep you locked up forever? In a cage, or a stable?” Yes. No. Yes. Maybe. No! I give up, I can’t say anything now, I’m just crying. “Everything you do for me at work, Stell, you’re serving me there every second. Do you do all that for the company? For the economy? For the world?” Shaking my head. Feeling like a fool.

“No, Stell, you do it all for me. For us. I know you do. Everything you do, you do for us. Everything I do is for us too. To build a life for us, so we can be independent someday soon and we won’t have to work so hard every day. I couldn’t build that life without you. I wouldn’t want to live it without you. Should I throw away everything inside you that isn’t locked in chains, everything you love, everything that makes you who you are, the people you love, your family, the Island? Stella, the more love you give the more love you have to give, you know that, and the more love you have and the happier you are, the more love you give me and the happier you make me. Should I throw away all the rest of your life and make you nothing but a cunt in a cage, a pony in a stall, a slave locked in shackles for life? I want more from you than that, Stella. I want all that too, you know you’ll always have to give me just as much of that as I want, but you can give me more than that. And I want all of it. You are the heart of my life and I want everything you can possibly give me, and you can give me much more than you think. Still, baby, after all these years, you still don’t know how much you give me. Do you? You give me so much more than you know. I’m not going to throw away any part of you, Stella. Ever. I need all of you.”

Me crying, hard to speak. Trying to catch my breath. Hiccuping. Surprise! Laughing at the hiccup. Lucia hugs me hard and laughs. “I know! I’m yours, Lucia, I’m yours! I want to give you all of me! I try so hard! I just want to give you everything everything everything—”

“Then why do you keep trying to give me less? Be less? Be half of what you are? Throw half of yourself away?”

Laughing now too, both of us. Feeling so silly for being such a crybaby about this. “I just want to give you more, not less! I just want it to be, I don’t know, purer. More pure. As pure as I can be for you. Nothing but your slave. Less complicated. Pure slave. You know what I mean.”

“I know, baby. You are my slave. You always will be. But you have to be what I want you to be. Exactly what I want you to be. That’s what it means for you to be my slave. You know that. But you’re lucky. We both are. I know what makes you the happiest you can possibly be is to be what I want you to be. You being what I want makes me happy, being what I want makes you happy, and making each other happy makes both of us very happy. So we can both be who we are and we can both be happy too. Now can we possibly go to bed tonight and be happy together?”

Laughing, still crying a little, her arms around me, squeezing me tight, trying to stuff me into a pocket in her heart. “Yes, please, Ma’am. I’m sorry. I’m such a mess sometimes. You know.”

“I know. You’re my mess. I love you, mess and all. You have a very simple job, slavegirl. Hard but simple. All you have to be is everything I want you to be, and all I want you to be is everything you possibly can be. The very best you can be. That’s all I want. But to be everything I want is so very simple for you, Stell.” Right in my ear, pulling me down into the bed by my chains and wrapping her arms and legs around me. “You already are. Everything I want. All I want is you.”

Yes. Yes yes yes. Lights out, storm over, rainclouds are parting, stars are out tonight. My world is right here in this bed. I snuggle down into the pocket in her heart. That pocket is just for me. And then she whispers in my ear.

“Stella. Remember. When we go there, we go there together.”

           

Stella (but Lucia helped me write some of this too, she remembered most of what we said the other night better than I did)

 

 

 

 

 

Welcome to the Island.

We know the hour is still early, running on Island time. We know the circle has only recently opened to bring you inside, but our circle is very happy to have you inside with us. The treaty isn't even signed yet, you don't have your I.D. bracelets and secret passwords and monogrammed beach towels yet, we haven't even picked out a date for the WELCOME ABOARD party yet! But you've landed safely on our shores, you've told us you want to come ashore and find sanctuary here, and we won't let you be swept out to sea and lost. We love you. We want you to join us and become a unique and extraordinary part of us, very soon. You already are a part of us, Ciara and Kelly, both of you. We're very happy you're coming aboard, step by beautiful step, and soon we'll make more party plans. May the sun always shine on our little Island, and may your footprints always join ours in the sand.

Lucia and Stella (and everyone on the Island)

I will go with her and I will follow her. I am proud to place my feet in her footsteps. And follow. And follow.

Stella

Thank you. Beyond words. Always and forever.

S