When Athain and I were in high school, we spent every waking moment together. This is really not an exaggeration, as we attended the same boarding school and since our dorms were adjacent, could conceivably be together from breakfast to lights out. We didn’t have many classes together, as his academic interests were more on the theologian/Young Republican end, where I was your typical quirky, aimless “creative” type, but as soon as eighth period ended, we would meet up in Wilson Hall and commandeer the TV until dinnertime. We usually watched talk shows, and God forbid the topic of the day had anything to do with homosexuality, because Athain could reliably be counted upon to lose his shit and goad me into a screaming match. Later in life I found it exceptionally ironic that, while I was ordinarily the most utterly mellow and unexcitable of people, the one thing that could drive me into a raving hysterical fit was Athain’s inevitable radical-Christian-right assertions that homosexuals were the scourge of the planet and were doomed to flaming hell pits and whatever torments an outraged Almighty could dream up for them. I was the perfect fag hag, and I didn’t even have a fag to be a hag to at the time (of course I did, I just didn’t know it).

After he came out right around the last third of our senior year, I began to learn some fascinating things about him—his experimental trysts in junior year with a guy he’d met through a personal ad, a brief but blistering rendezvous with the tennis coach on a vacation to Hilton Head, and so on. The buttoned-up, stuffed-shirt preppie kid I thought I knew so well had vanished like smoke, leaving in its place a freaky, shrieky, outrageous daredevil who thought nothing of attending a movie premiere in full drag or faking suicide attempts to exact revenge on ex-boy toys. I was initially a little unnerved by this head-snapping 180-degree personality flip, but warmed up fairly quickly to this much more accessible Athain, and remained his faithful and devoted hip attachment for the next ten years.

When the TV show Will and Grace came out, I instantly drew a parallel to Athain’s and my life, as I’m sure did every woman who shares an inappropriate level of intimacy with her closest gay friend. We lived right across from each other, we had the witty topical banter, all the emotional codependent clamps were firmly in place. The only difference was that I was never exactly thrilled when Athain had a new man in his life—in fact I was a bit of an, er, saboteur, if you will. But above all I always believed that we would be together forever, always able to wave across the way to each other, always able to reaffirm our worth by the naked adoration of the other, world without end, amen.

Then came 9/11 and Athain’s subsequent departure to Berlin, like a putrid dessert following a rancid main course, and I was suddenly left to fend for myself. I don’t mean it to sound quite so orphanly, but that’s how I felt. I’ve always been perfectly comfortable being alone, maybe because I wasn’t the most popular kid growing up (especially when I went through a mercifully brief refusal-to-bathe period right about the time I turned thirteen). Athain was the first person I’d ever felt the need to be close to. Seeing him warmed my heart down to the cockles, touching him felt like sliding into a warm bath, gazing into his eyes made my stomach all squishy. I’ve never felt such a sense of comfort and peace with anyone before. Most of the time I feel like I don’t know what to say to people, and I have to talk reallyreallyfast and witty or the other person’s going to get bored and think me a jackass. Athain and I often thought each other were jackasses, but it was okay because we were. We gave ourselves the freedom to fight, to be pissy, to take our frustrations with the world out on each other and think nothing of it the next day. As someone who is painfully, almost pathologically nice, I cherish the scratching post part of our friendship dearly. It’s a rare person who’ll give you that.

The last few months have been a disturbing, self-imposed caesura (and part of the reason why this installment has taken so long to get up). After a really delightful night of carousing with Jason and Soph the Tuesday before Thanksgiving, made more so by the fact that we were all miserable for one reason or another at the time, I awoke to find myself puking into a bucket in the emergency room at St. Luke’s Hospital. I have not been able to piece together the events leading up to that moment, as I remember nothing from the time I left the bar. I must have taken one hell of a fall, or maybe I got punched and then fell, or ran into a wall, who knows. A skidding scrape under my left eye suggests that I probably just took a faceplant on the sidewalk, but I’ll never know.

To complicate exponentially the matter of the emergency room and the fact that I was plated with vomit from head to toe was that the Good Samaritan who found me must have used the address on my driver’s license, which I’ve never bothered to update, to contact my mother, who was sitting in a chair across from me with an expression on her face that defied description. Seeing her there, I was convinced that I’d slipped my earthly bonds and woken up in, um, yeah, HELL.

In the weeks that followed, I was suffocated in a pool of melancholy so deep I was barely able to function. Consciously I knew I ought to be turning cartwheels and thanking whatever God had seen fit to drag my sorry ass to safety—I suffered no worse injury than a pair of busted glasses and the aforementioned (kinda cool) scar, and my anonymous hero had held onto my purse, which contained over nine hundred dollars in cash, until my mother could claim it. (Bizarrely, Soph suffered something of the same fate, although exponentially worse. We got a kick out of our matching black eyes for a while.) There was no real reason I should feel like shit run over twice, but I did.

It was during that month or so down the rabbit hole that I truly learned what it was to be alone. I couldn’t confide in anyone, because I honestly didn’t know what was wrong. And God, how I wanted to! For the first time in my thoroughly placid, unassuming life I wanted to wail, shout, weep, lose it completely and sick up the terrible numbing fog and fear in my head. I dreamed of endless nights like the one I’d lived through: blackouts, loss of dignity, looks of pity and disgust, the agonizing knowledge that I’d sold my soul to a devil disguised as a seraph, but which was in reality all teeth and claws and possessed of an insectile consciousness that would pull me beneath the black waters of my addiction with no mercy, no regard for my screams.

So I lived like a ghost in my home, sleepwalking through work, refusing to take phone calls and hiding in my room. I wouldn’t say anything to anyone except to insist that I was fine, fine, FINE. It was clear to anyone who cared to look that I wasn’t at all fine, but you can’t force an admission of despair out of someone except in the movies, or on TV. It was shortly before New Year’s when Nikki, probably sick to death of my yelling “I’m not here” every time the phone rang, brought me the telephone with a somewhat stern expression, and Athain was on the line. I don’t think I’ve ever been more distant or uninterested sounding on the phone with him—this is a guy I once talked to for seven hours straight about absolutely nothing. At a certain point in the conversation I got a little snippy and told him I’d have to speak to him some other time. “What’s wrong, Jamie?” he asked, very simply, sounding a little bewildered. It was that kind of soft, kind of hurt tone in his voice that made me realize just how far wrong things had gone with me, and I finally broke down and wept until everything was pissed out on the ground and I could finally breathe again.

What I realized during all this wailing and teeth-gnashing was that I was lonely, plain and simple. Not in the obvious, “where is everybody” sort of way, but deeper, more fundamentally, like someone had cut a large chunk out of me and left me to walk around with the wind blowing through that empty space. The simple comfort of prescience, knowing there was someone out there who anticipated my feelings and needs and thoughts without my even having to voice them, and the satisfaction of being able to provide the same, was missing from my life, and it was a massive bummer. Perhaps if I’d been involved with someone I might not have felt so crummy, but I wasn’t and I did, and I hate feeling needy, so I drank until I didn’t feel much of anything. And it worked—for a while. Until an omnipotent hand sent me sprawling in the most literal way, and reminded me that even in my times of greatest need and greatest shame, I’m not alone, so I might as well stop fucking acting like it.

When I was able to, I called Athain back and told him pretty much everything. And in his naturally breezy, sensible way, he validated all of my fears and concerns while at the same time forcing me to look at the big picture, which was that I am the one responsible for my own happiness. As wonderful as it is to have people in my life that can sometimes spookily read my mind, who can be the most egregious enablers in the world and give me a stage on which to escape the world’s grayness in a 24-hour party, it is in the end MY mind, and my decision to ultimately make whether I want to crawl in a vodka bottle and pull the cork in after me or not. I lost three aunts and uncles to this same addiction—I’ve got no excuse to screw my life up with such stark PSAs staring me in the face.

I actually finished this particular tale in January, and was two weeks sober at the time. Of course my birthday was in February, so much for that! But I’m better, less compulsive about it, so I guess that’s progress. Athain has moved back to the United States to start a bed-and-breakfast with his fiancé. Jason and Soph seem happier and healthier in outlook than they’ve been in a good while. The people I love are all thriving and well. And I’ve reconnected with the ex-love of my life (at least on my side), who’s grown into a dear, beloved friend. I’m finally beginning to understand the difference between embracing something and wallowing in it, as I’ve done with food, sex, alcohol, solitude, even dare I say it, hagdom. How surprisingly difficult it can sometimes be to simply appreciate the construct of one’s life instead of desperately trying to stretch and twist and mold it into something you think fits better.

I hope my friends and family know how much I love them.

I hope I can accept someone special in my life without sacrificing the immense pleasures of solitude.

I hope I can be the happy-go-lucky life of the party WITHOUT a dozen martinis sloshing around in my gut.

I hope I’ll always hear a voice on the other end of the phone that might as well be my own.

I hope.*

Yours in hagdom,

Jamielah

* Apologies to Stephen King (see “Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption,” from the short story collection Different Seasons)