{"id":19123,"date":"2009-11-11T20:05:43","date_gmt":"2009-11-12T01:05:43","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/?p=19123"},"modified":"2009-11-12T01:09:15","modified_gmt":"2009-11-12T06:09:15","slug":"simone-and-kaila-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/daily-astrology\/simone-and-kaila-2\/","title":{"rendered":"Simone and Kaila, 2"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Simone<\/a>
Simone at the grave of her friend and lover Kaila Ann Watson. Photo by Eric Francis.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Kaila died of a heroin overdose<\/strong><\/a> in March, just before the equinox. At the time it was just the latest horrendous thing to happen in Simone’s life, and by far the worst. The girls had been inseparable since they were very little and they would announce unabashedly that they had been lovers since age seven. This was adorable. The really, really funny stories came from their moms.<\/p>\n

The funeral was surreal; services for young people always have that quality. Kaila had been the famous kid who survived four open heart surgeries at Boston Childrens’ Hospital. Everyone knew her or had heard of her. Her mom, Toby, works for the publishing company that puts out all the local papers, so she’s also a fixture in the community. Everyone who knew the family had gone through the tumult of the surgeries and coming close to losing Kaila again and again.<\/p>\n

All summer Simone nudged me about doing nudes at Kaila’s grave. I’m not sure why I was resisting; a busy summer, yes, but also this was pretty emotional territory and a bit strange even by my standards. Finally after one other rained out attempt, we picked a Sunday morning and arranged to go. By then Simone and I had a mutual friend, Dina Disaster, so Dina got the gig of being photo assistant. We stopped at a gas station convenience store and stocked up on coffee, cigarettes, candy and whatever else they wanted, and headed to the cemetery.<\/p>\n

We found Kaila’s grave without a problem — the one other time I tried to find it, I became disoriented and it took a while, but this time we walked right up to it. Her mom had put a marble bench there; she visits every night. Friends had left trinkets and liquor bottles and toy rats — Kaila was always accompanied by a rat. I discovered this personally photographing her and Simone one day; suddenly after spending a whole evening in my house, she was cuddling this cute little rodent; obviously it was friendly.<\/p>\n

We had incredible fun that morning. We could hear Kaila laughing the whole time. Finally someone was doing something a little weird here. The peak moment was: Simone standing there on the new grave, naked as a nymph, while I knelt at her feet and with a squirt bottle full of white vinegar and some newspapers, and polished the oval mirror that we used in some of the photos. And while we were doing this, a guy came riding through the cemetery on his bicycle, out for a Sunday morning ride.<\/p>\n

The girls got nervous. I said, “Just pretend nothing unusual is going on, don’t even worry about it.”<\/p>\n

I wonder what he thought.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Kaila died of a heroin overdose in March, just before the equinox. At the time it was just the latest horrendous thing to happen in Simone’s life, and by far the worst. The girls had been inseparable since they were very little and they would announce unabashedly that they had been lovers since age seven. … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"generate_page_header":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19123"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=19123"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19123\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=19123"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=19123"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=19123"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}