The Tenth Island: Finding Joy, Beauty, and Unexpected Love in the Azores

by Diana Marcum

“The Tenth Island is what you carry inside you. It’s what’s left when everything else falls away. Those of us who live between worlds just know the Tenth Island better. No matter where I have lived—I have never left my island.”

I liked the idea of my own, personal Tenth Island, made only of things I wanted to keep. I’d start by carrying inside me a place where a desk clerk looked confused when a woman asked where it was safe for her to walk alone.

I wish I could figure out the rules that the universe follows for catching you when you jump off a cliff. There seems to be some sort of caveat that the life rafts won’t line up until after you’re hurtling through the air spread out for a belly flop.

It’s not just endings that matter.

It’s easy to forget that beginnings and middles are just as much if not more than how a particular story ends.

“When I go down on my knees and sing that song, the feeling is—I don’t know the English word for it—it’s like I’m outside myself and connected to other times and so aware of all the beauty and all the threat.” “Yeah,” I said. “I don’t know the English word for that either.” But I knew the feeling.