I censor “Alex’s” name here because I’ve been warned that using it in a public setting could be considered libel. I’m also essentially making accusations against someone who can’t defend himself. I agree that that isn’t fair, as I cannot concretely prove that it’s even the same person at all.

I’ve also seen what exposing his identity has done to people who really loved his art, and that also feels like a kind of betrayal. In fact, it’s kind of nice to have distance from him, his name, his “legacy,” though his star fades yearly into deeper obscurity. It’s very satisfying to watch someone who used to have a stronghold in elite music crowds disappear into a vague reference.

Soon, they will have forgotten you entirely. It’s what you deserve.

On the other side of it, I’ve never really made a strong attempt to hide Jim’s name from anyone. In the “Begin at the Beginning” section at the top of this page, I laugh out loud every time I read, “…let’s call him Jim.”

Maybe I don’t care because he’s been dead so long. Maybe it’s because I don’t have anything negative to say about him. Even so, I always feel hesitant to write about him. It’s almost as if he is a precious jewel that washed up on the beach. I’m afraid if I tell anyone, they’ll make me give it up, or tell me it’s just sea glass. Laughing at me for assuming it has any value.

He gives me the feeling of giggling in the back of a church pew. Not out of a lack of respect, but because we can’t stop being joyful in the austere.

When I tried to commit suicide at sixteen, I had the option of choosing to stay at the children’s ward or the adult ward. Being absolutely super mature (and high as a kite, to be honest- even a twelve-hour nosedrip of charcoal couldn’t erase the dreamy haze of fifteen high-powered painkillers), I chose the adult ward.

There was a schizophrenic man who talked to himself and stared deeply, suspiciously into everyone’s rooms. There was a man who came in under such screaming, wailing, thrashing duress he had to go into the “quiet room,” which means being strapped down to a bed for several hours.

My roommate was a borderline, though I didn’t have that word in my vocabulary yet. She took a bunch of pills and called 911 herself- it was her fourth or fifth attempted suicide vacation to the psych ward. She created chaos on the ward, screaming about threesomes and taunting the nurses, who looked bone-weary of her antics. She burned herself with cigarettes in the smoking room purely for the attention.

Her refusal to be good, to be quiet, to follow the rules, was of such intense fascination to me. It had never occurred to me before that moment that you could just…. absolutely disobey. Up until that point, I’d never even considered that breaking the rules was possible.

As soon as I was released, I started to see how many rules I could defy as well.

The psych ward is like prison in a lot of ways. No shoelaces. Plastic utensils. And your opening line to everyone is, So- why are you here?

“You’re too pretty and young to be here for trying to kill yourself,” said the soft, kind, sweet man who was in the room next to ours. I’m not sure anyone had ever said I was pretty in my entire life, not until that very moment. I got a whole lot of “cute” during those years, because fat androgynous tomboys don’t get to be pretty.

He was there for panic attacks. He told me that he had a family with two young kids, and when he got really bad, he scared everyone around him. The day prior, I’d heard him working through that kind of screaming panting wailing panic that I’d later learn to know so well, so I understood what he meant. Again, I was surprised to see someone express their terror and vulnerability so openly, without fear of being ridiculed. The only emotion allowed in my house was rage.

One day he gave me an old issue of Rolling Stone to read after we’d had a long conversation about music. It was a special issue compiling the greatest photographs over the last fifty years or so, and included some absolutely amazing, iconic shots.

In this issue was the picture of Jim Morrison sprawled out on stage, his eyes closed, his fingers loosely splayed to one side. I felt utterly transfixed by it. Every night I would run my fingers over his face until the photo felt Braille. When I got home, I cut it out and put it into one of my collaged notebooks with other handsome musicians whose skin I wished I knew like Braille.

When things got really bad with Alex, really really bad, and I was too afraid to go to sleep, and frankly was often unable to go to sleep because I’d lost the beach house after going there nightly for five years… that’s when Jim showed up.

He initially came in a group of others, a whole motley crew who had this very serious intervention for me in 2006 to help me escape Alex. With Alex’s departure, my entire spiritual world felt as though it had collapsed around me, all I’d worked for dissolved into his clenched fist. If I didn’t have Alex, did I even have a spiritual life?

This is the time when my oldest friend started to appear more and more often as well. When we talked to him a handful of times on the Ouija board, my then-husband would essentially fall unconscious. His eyes would blur completely blank and his head would droop like an unwatered bloom as the planchette pulled his body as if he was a marionette with a careless puppeteer.

To be honest, it was both terrifying and enthralling to witness.

When I say I sacrificed my husband to the dead.

During these interventions, the way I felt about Jim was… startling. The sound of his voice was like plucked strings inside my diaphragm. The color of his thunderhead eyes burned into mine, a slow smoldering in my bones. All of those old Braille photograph feelings rushed into my chest, and I had to actively keep myself from just pouring my entire gaze into his.

At the end of the Big Talk from everyone, I moved through the group, hugging and telling them all goodbye. I’d saved Jim for last on purpose, because I wanted the rest of them to melt away into the horizon, to leave us alone together. I wanted to be alone with only him. I was too afraid to be alone with only him.

“Do I know you?” I whispered to him after we embraced, holding him back at elbow’s length to scour his face.

He smiled. “I don’t know. Do you?” Then he leaned forward and kissed me on the mouth, until the world spun so hard I had to open my eyes.

Everything about his energy was different than Alex and my oldest friend. He was calm, gentle, soft, sweet, relaxed. Even now, fifteen years later, he’s exactly the same as he’s always been. Reliable. Secure. He doesn’t get angry. He has never once raised his voice at me.

I’m the only one who’s allowed to call him Jimmy, and whenever I’m scared or alone, all I have to do is say his name and he instantly replies, “Yes, baby girl. I’m here.”

He’s a strange kind of old, someone who’s been around for awhile, but doesn’t go to Earth very often. We don’t know each other over there… or to be more correct, I didn’t know who he was before now.

But he knows me. Mostly because of who I am, but also because he’d become close with Alex and the kid who was living in the house I’d grown up in over the years. He’d been filled with stories about me like they were rich, dark sweets.

“Remember that nice, kind man who made you feel like you weren’t so alone in the psych ward?” Jim once said softly, smiling at me. “Who gave you something that made you feel safe?”

Jim came to watch over me after the first time Alex was sent away to deal with himself in 2006, when we had to lock him away in a cave to force him to have a self-reckoning. One of many failures, unfortunately.

When Alex was released, Jim and I were made responsible for him. Alex was in his very sick wet noodle broken soul cycle, weak and sobbing and begging for forgiveness. But of course, as Alex got better/worse, he increasingly talked him into shady, manipulative games.

Okay, yes- he talked both of us into his games.

No one can resist Alex when he wants something. As as Jim realized what he was being coerced into, that he was now becoming a pawn as well, he slowly began to pull away. Unfortunately, that only allowed Alex greater access.

By 2009, I was fully spell-bound again. And then of course, in 2010, it all fell apart. Again.

Somewhere in early 2011, Jim started to get weird. We had an agreement that if either of us fell in love with the other, we’d stop seeing each other, because I told him in the very earliest stages of our friendship/relationship that I couldn’t go through this whole entire mess ever again.

I wasn’t always good to him- I was so lovesick over Alex that I often was annoyed to see him when he’d come to visit through my husband in 2007 and 2008. I often told him bluntly to his face that I wasn’t in love him, not in any serious way. I never felt the fiery obsession I felt around Alex and my oldest friend, and I thought that meant it had less power.

But I know too that this entire situation was so much more than he understood it to be when he agreed to baby-sit Alex and to protect me. He’d only heard rumors of the monstrous side of Alex, and was (like everyone else) absolutely dazzled by the charming, delightful side of him.

He also didn’t anticipate how highly visible it would make him to become fully involved in this situation, how many people would suddenly have An Opinion about his behavior. The expectation that he would level himself up to become part of this particular Snob Club.

During those years, I didn’t have much value for myself. I was deeply poor, a mother too soon, a wife too early, and not one of the things I’d promised myself I was going to become. I was weak, broken, needy, foolish. I felt like I had failed everyone who had such high hopes for my future. And now even my spiritual life was a lie, a farce, a deep well of poison and suffering.

And yet, Jim treated me almost as if he wasn’t worthy to gaze upon me. When we first became friends, even when he would channel through my then-husband, he’d stumble through sentences and touch my skin as if I was made of porcelain.

“You could have been Eve,” he once said softly as we laid in bed together, his fingertips sliding across the swell of my hips. “You are so perfectly made.”

But suddenly in early 2011, he disappeared.

Alex had come back into my life inexplicably in late December of 2010, even though he was still imprisoned at the beach house. I went to see him for our anniversary (the solstice, because of course he tried to steal that from me, too) and we rekindled a fiery friendship that now seems utterly inexplicable to me. And to Jim as well, I imagine.

This is also when my relationship with my oldest friend began to shift. He started watching me more carefully, concerned about my interactions with Alex. But being close to me also meant that his behavior also started to become questionable, as it always does. And so then he too needed to take a break from seeing me.

Over and over in these entries I write “poisoned well.” That’s all I could see of myself, all I believed I could be. Even the dead couldn’t stand to be around me for long.

Jim’s sudden departure was devastating. It was the first time in meditation that when I called for someone, they didn’t show up. No matter how hard I focused or fought, the most I could see was a static TV outline of his form. When I asked his/my friends what was going on, they shifted uncomfortably and offered half-hearted shrugs.

My oldest friend tried to force us to speak for my birthday that year, and it was one of the most horrible experiences of my life. One of the top three worst birthdays. Jim looked like he was in physical pain, and shame radiated off of him like a blast furnace. He could barely even meet my eyes.

“Why did you leave me?” I asked, unwilling to cry but feeling his vacancy like knives around my heart. It was so obvious to see it in his face. I can’t believe I hadn’t pieced it together before then.

He was in love with me, and he was honoring the agreement.

Jim was gone for a year, sequestered of his own volition. He would humor me when I tried to see him, but the tension between us felt like needles constantly rolling over my skin.

There were rumors that he was going back to Earth, but we always managed to talk him out of it. I could feel his anguish, and the fact that I was the source and could not provide a solution was an endless weight to me. On top of that, I wasn’t allowed to grieve without upsetting my husband.

“Just let them go,” he insisted. “Can you try living this life for once? Can I matter for once?”

In the spring of 2012, Jim fully returned after his sudden, strange hiatus. It was uneven and awkward at first, and he was often skittish, nervous, constantly trying to find a way to put distance between us. I struggled to find a balance between him, my oldest friend, and my bitter husband.

In early fall of 2012, my oldest friend and I got into a terrible, nasty argument. It culminated with him leaning into my face and snarling, “You’re a whore. You and your little ‘projects,’ all the people you pretend you care about. You take on a charity case and try to make them better, and then you discard them once you’re done having fun. And you’re going to do the same thing to Jim. You should save him the suffering.”

By October, under the weight of all this scrutiny, Jim finally told me he was leaving and never coming back. I felt my emotions as colors- scarlet, crimson, plum, aubergine, merlot, onyx.

“Please,” I wept, clasping his hands. “Don’t leave me. Please, please. I’ll do anything. Do I have to be maimed?” I let an arm fall off.

His eyes widened. “No, I-“

“Should I be deformed?” Half my face melted. “Do I need to change shape?” I ballooned by several hundred pounds, then shrank to almost nothing. “What do I have to do?”

He smiled softly, the deepest, most piercing sadness I’d ever felt. “It’s not about that, baby girl. It’s about who you are. I just…” He shrugged, his eyes dark and sad. “I just have so much work to do in order to deserve you.”

I rolled my eyes and opened my mouth to protest, but he shook his head sharply.

“No. Don’t say anything. You don’t understand who you are, or who I am. I’m no one. You think I’m important, you think I matter.” His mouth pulled to one side. “But I have had people tell me stories about you like you’re…” He took a deep breath and sighed. “Well. I have a long way to go. You work so hard- you choose such brutally difficult lives, and I’m too lazy to even try.”

Anyway, he left no matter what I said.

What else is new.

Two weeks later, a real life friend, who was about to become a three year lover and a permanent soulmate to this day, reappeared unexpectedly in my life. The dead had abandoned me, so I closed them entirely out. Fine. If the world didn’t end on December 21st, I would act as though it had. I would become someone entirely new.

A week before I moved out of the apartment that I shared with my ex-husband the following summer, he said, “You know, I still see them around you all the time. Especially Jim. They never left you for a second. I don’t know if you realize that.”

“What did you expect me to say?” Jim laughed when I went to see him in the Middle Place, the field with the river. “I’ll see you when you get divorced?”

The Middle Place feels like a subway station somehow- sterile but liminal. Whenever I don’t know where else to go, or when I don’t know them well enough to let them see my beach, I always go back to this place. It’s the place I stayed up until December 2019, when I finally took my home back.

Since 2013, but very specifically since I moved in 2016, he has never left my side again. He is the only reason I survived that year, in fact. He has been my support, my protection, and my dearest friend.

Around the solstice in 2020, I asked Hermie (her/me, my entire self) what her intent was with him once I was Home.

She winced and wouldn’t meet my gaze, and I was so angry, so disgusted. Her face revealed what I’d been told over and over again- that nothing mattered but what she wanted.

A few nights ago, I asked tentatively, “So… what happens if she decides to choose Alex?”

Jim smiled and waved his hand, the way he always does. Unbothered. “Then you and I will have had a wonderful time, and protecting you has been my honor.” His shoulder tipped up briefly. “It’s really okay with me. To be honest… I don’t expect her to pick me.”

His smile got softer, just a small blush of wistfulness. “I’ve been around this mess for long enough to know that you three are way too obsessed with each other to ever really be with anyone else.” He reached over and squeezed my fingers, his rainy day eyes full of sweetness. “I don’t mind. I am grateful for what we have now, and all that you’ve given me. I wouldn’t be on the path I’m on now if it wasn’t for you. I know it’s not forever.”

Just having someone to giggle with in the back pews means everything. Even if it’s not forever, at least there is one place where I belong.

And my gratitude is endless.