Open Arms

If you’d have told me two years ago as I was staring at my open arms, open from where I’d cut them, as I was bleeding to death, that two years later I’d be happy, I’d tell you you were a fucking idiot. But you’d be right.

They told me later that if it weren’t for the ice cold water that I jumped into after doing what I did, I would’ve died. That it slowed the blood flow. It was a quick fall from the bridge: first air, then green-blue, almost black. Pure cold. I wonder to this day if I subconsciously did it on purpose. That maybe I’d heard about cold water stopping bleeding before, and had kept that as my backup plan if I decided I actually wanted to live.

There was my body, thrashing in the water, fighting to stay afloat with arms tired from blood loss. There was my blood, already staining my winter jacket, coloring my jeans, dispersing slowly into the Chicago River. There was my baptism, removed from my first baptism by twenty years and some change, but probably representing death and rebirth better than the first one. What could you need to be reborn from as an infant anyway? Original sin always reeked of bullshit to me.

After the rescue, after the ambulance ride, after the placement in the psych ward and the tearful visits from friends and family, I lay supine on my bed, let the clear light come in, and flipped open the David Foster Wallace novel that my friend gave me. The irony of being gifted a book that was written by someone who committed suicide after myself attempting suicide was not lost on me. I read about being a hero of inaction. Of not doing something grand and large, but instead simply not doing the wrong thing. Of making small and unsexy sacrifices each and every day for the good of others. Of putting a box around this day, this hour if you need to. I remember just looking at the cover for what seemed like hours, those perfect white clouds in an untouched blue sky, the title a seeming impossibility. Can anyone really ever reach infinite jest anyway?

I was in a toxic relationship, my job was shit, and I knew I needed a fresh start. So I left the relationship, quit my job, and moved halfway across the country. Every day felt like I was trapped at the bottom of a pitch-black well. The Frankenstein stitches came out of my arms, the wounds healed, days went by, but I couldn’t find a way out of the well. I tried to drink my way out of it, fuck my way out of it, but nothing really helped.

So I wrote. Wrote shit like this, fictionalized just enough so I could work up the nerve to put it out there. If you can slap that “fiction” label onto it, it’s almost as if it didn’t happen to you, no matter how true to life it is. I published. Got brought on as an editor of an online litmag. Reviewed other litmags for a major publication.

The well was still just as deep, but light was starting to seep in.

I went to bars. Going to bars was never my thing, but I assumed that that’s what you were supposed to do in that kind of situation. I met people. Slept with people. Got over that awkward guilt that comes with sleeping with someone new after getting out of a longterm relationship and being accustomed to sleeping with only one person for years. Was reminded of the grand diversity in bodies in the world, the grand diversity in ways to please those bodies. Wrote poems for women I hooked up with when they asked, turned men who reclined on my bed into characters in my stories.

I assembled some of my stories, realized that I was writing a novel without even knowing it. Had enough material for 30 pages, then took over from there. Wrote every day. Covered everything. Growing up poor. Getting bullied. Surviving sexual abuse and not knowing how to express that as a young boy. The works. Even covered that cold day with open arms, the freezing water that kept me alive.

So I don’t know when it happened. It wasn’t an overnight thing, that’s for sure. But one day, while taking inventory of my life and its debits and credits, I realized that I was happy. Things weren’t perfect. There were still plenty of improvements to be made. But I was happy. Content. Comfortable in my own body, my own head.

The book’s publication was nothing more than the cherry on top, believe it or not. It was the light beyond the well’s top, after I’d climbed my way out over the course of two years, fingers bloody and aching. I took my copy outside and sat on my porch, let the clear light come in, and looked at the cover, at my own name written on it. And then I looked at my arms, no longer open, scars faded. I closed my eyes, opened them again. Breathed. Felt the book’s cover between my fingers and turned to page one.