NS August 24th, 2006

Last night, the lights went out. Sitting in my living room with The Husband and four friends, laughing, talking, drinking wine, and then — darkness. The whole building was out, and half of our street. I lit some candles and the room was instantly thrown into the soft glow of ambience. Opium den chic, if you will.

I love blackouts. The fact that we just happened to have friends over when it occurred was even better as it reminded me of sitting around various darkened dorm rooms at college with nothing to see but the silhouettes of moody freshman trying to define themselves in the candlelight, with the help of a box of cheap wine and a homemade bong called Big Momma. I lived in the ‘hippy dorm’, the one that housed all the tortured artists, bohemian, granola-crunching, barefoot guitar players, angry feminists, sensitive poets, just-out-of-the-closet gay men, and people like me — the observers, the ones who weren’t particularly artsy or socially outcast but enjoyed hanging around these types. I certainly didn’t fit in with the sorority crowd, or the athletes, or the super-academic elites. I was just a smart-mouthed girl from Hicksville who wanted to do something bigger, better and more important than anything that small hometown could offer. My crappy poems, a desire to travel and a thirst for worldliness was all I had when I arrived and I fell in love with the uniqueness, the freakishness, the intensity of this community. I started learning about the rest of the country and the rest of the world, something that my insular high school barely even alluded to. Life outside of Hicksville?! Surely not!

Of course, being a freshman away from home for the first time, this desire to expand my horizons included freeing my mind via various narcotic intermediaries. Mmm, drugs were good, ummkay? I’d smoked the odd doobie (I really think we should bring back this word) and had been drunk a fair few times in high school but since the chances of finding anything edgier than tequila in Hicksville were slim-to-none, I’d never really had the opportunity to join the high life. Soon I had found my calling in Pink Floyd/Yellow Submarine/Wizard of Oz form and skipped merrily around campus with my Kool Aid Acid Test Gang. We soon became known as “those trip kids,” deservedy so after the night we attached miner’s lights to our foreheads, strapped on galoshes and crawled into the underground water system so we could pop up from random manholes and scare the shit out the older students staggering home from the bars. I had finally found my niche, something I was good at. Okay, I couldn’t put it on my resume but HEY! it was fun and that’s what freshman year is all about, right?

Freshman year turned into sophomore year and my own apartment, shared with a more responsible but crazy-in-her-own-way friend (shoutout to A!). The trips to La La Land continued, evolved to include other not-as-nice recreations, and became more intense. I was having a hell of a year — struggling to make it to classes because of the late nights, mentally worn down by all the electrodes bouncing around and exploding in my head, no doubt. Add to this the misery of being in love but seperated by an ocean from my then-boyfriend (The Now Husband) and I had myself a recipe for the mother of all cocktails: Fucked Up On The Rocks. I was determined to drink this cocktail over and over again until I create my own personal blackout, for whatever reason.

Luckily, my roommate talked me into withdrawing from classes that semester to save my already precarious position at the university and I took a hiatus. A few months later I moved to London to be with The Now Husband and got myself together — full time office job, apartment, new friends who didn’t run around calling the gravel Pebble People and naming each piece, learning my boundaries and how to be a grown up. I eventuallly went back to college and finished my degree, with Honors. I don’t regret that time in my life, I made some brilliant life-long friends and had a frickin’ blast but I was glad to put it behind me and move on. Unfortunately, not everyone can.

My best friend at the time, Angry Gay Man, continued on this path and never did learn his limits. He overdosed and died in July 2003, alone at his aunt’s house. She and her family were away on vacation and he was housesitting. He had been dead for at least four days before anyone discoverd him. The ruling was Accidental Overdose but in my heart I knew at least part of it was no accident. AGM knew what drinking a fifth of vodka and taking a handful of sleepy-time pills would do, he was no fool. We were hardly novices at this game. And so, where others emerged from their blackouts, his remained permanent.

When the lights came back on last night I was sad for a brief moment, feeling cozy and comfy in the darkness and drowining in the memories. But then my daughter stirried in the next room, crying out for me, needing me, depending on me. And suddenly, I had never been so glad that the lights were back on, brighter than ever.

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