wrists

“Sometimes I think if I had just beaten you we would have been fine. We would have still been together. If I ever heard now that you were with another man and he was doing that to you, I’d try to get you back so I could do the same thing.”

This was something a man said to me after taking a knife to my wrist. I rubbed the initials he had scraped into my skin. I flexed my hands, the M stretched down to my forearm, red and angry. 

My wrists were very thin and weak, a trait I’d always been proud of and a feature of mine that had been in focus for as long as I can remember. My dad gave me a jade bangle when I was 9, customary in Chinese culture, a tiny thing you slide on then never take off as the arm grows and the jade becomes a permanent fixture. I can still slide it on and off at 28 and everytime I put it on and feel it knocking against my wrist bone as I type emails I feel a not-insignificant rush of satisfaction. 

As a child I was once taken to an amusement park called Wannado City. It was for some other kid’s birthday party— my mother would have never voluntarily brought me to such a place littered with germs and tacky plastic, tacky people. We listened to Disney music in the minivan on the way over and talked about which vocations we would choose. The park was essentially a make-believe adult world for kids, like a giant doll house where we were the dolls and we were the ones controlling them. A few of my friends had elected to be hairdressers, firefighters, and lawyers. I hadn’t made my mind up during the car ride and went in blind. I think I spent a few minutes in a grocery store with my Wannado Bucks and ended up broke quickly, then arrested. I had elected to be a prisoner, this was my accidental vocation. The kids who had elected to be policemen put plastic handcuffs around my wrists, my perfect wrists. 

Years later I would meet a writer who would become briefly infatuated with me and then write about that story, a story that only came to mind after a few drinks with him in a bar. In some ways I understand being a prisoner was the vocation I was meant to have, I was meant to be constricted and punished for all eternity, meant to stare down at my slim wrists and contemplate their fragility forever, not just because of age-old Catholic guilt but because I am always more alive when I feel trapped, when I feel beaten down. I think this writer understood this inherently and immediately. In his story my imprisonment quickly turns erotic and I contemplate the darkness of the cell I’m confined to as a man whispers lines from a John Dunne poem in my ear. The Dunne poem he chose for the story was a poem set on the winter solstice, my birthday, he didn’t know this at the time and it just worked out that way, little signs of fate interwoven everywhere. 

When I was 20 a boy put real handcuffs on me, hard metal and cold to the touch. He snapped them on and linked them to his bedframe. I felt them digging into my wrists while he fucked me, pinching my skin whenever he slapped me, and hoped they’d leave a mark. How pretty they’ll look, I thought. How lovely to carry this passion on my skin.

When the handcuffs snapped onto my perfect wrists my body woke up, eager for the fight. Months later when that boy became a man and cuffed me to the same bedframe not out of playfulness but out of real anger, out of a genuine desire to punish me, I was more awake than ever. I made a silent prayer that he wouldn’t hold back. Mark them forever, I thought. Keep me here, I don’t want to go back to sleep. 

The writer calls me angel, invoked whenever I say something nice to him or complimentary about his writing. It makes me feel cheap and feels wrong, one thing cancelling out the other.

When I was 14 I tried to walk away from a boy in the hallway in high school and he grabbed me by the wrist to pull me back. I succumbed to him out of necessity; I had never realized the full extent of my weakness. His grip was a vice, my futile (and insincere) attempts at escape inconsequential to a freshman on a fast track for the NHL. During the summer when he was training somewhere far away we would talk on Skype for hours and I’d watch his perfect blue eyes through the screen. I searched them for signs of life and never found any, the serenity of their emptiness lulled me to sleep and I’d dream of him then wake up to his pixelated body, wishing I could touch him, wishing that he would emerge from the image and put my wrists back in his hands. He plays for the Capitals now and has a wife with arms as inconsequential as mine. A friend from high school sent me a podcast with no context aside from a timestamp last week. The timestamp corresponded to a 2 minute segment in which sports journalists who fancied themselves comedians talked about the hockey player that had shown me just how weak I was at 14. They were discussing the fact that he is strongly against lightbulbs, refuses to have any in his house, the blankness in his eyes now manifested in him being a full blown conspiracy theorist, a natural arc for a lot of guys from my high school. I wonder if he holds his wife’s wrists down in a room lit entirely by beeswax candles. I wonder if the blankness ever leaves his eyes.

My love for the hockey player ultimately got me put into police-grade handcuffs and stuck in the back of a squad car for 10 minutes. I was being unfairly punished, I thought, for underage drinking at a party in which I would be forced to be face to face with the man who had left me for a woman who was as stupid as he was. Numbing my pain given the horrendous circumstances should surely be allowed, laughed off as a minor offense. In the end they did let me go with my friend, who was numbing an entirely different pain, and her mother, who was just numb entirely, after failing to contact my parents at the number that had been dead for 6 months. 

I remember thinking that maybe if my beautiful dumb ex-boyfriend had heard of my dramatic arrest he’d come to my aid and I’d be as calm as I was then, stuck in his perfect prison cell of stupidity, the strength in his hands keeping me firmly on the ground.

For many months after my wrists were caught in the hockey player’s vice and for many months after I knew they never would be again, I would stretch and circle them until I heard the bones click before cheerleading practice. I would wrap them slowly, daily ritual, binding them tightly with gauze before bending them to their breaking point. I fixated on a new man. He had a Picasso tattoo from the blue period and a Pink Floyd wallet and he played guitar and he would run his black eyes up and down my body while teaching and that was all good enough for me. I’d go to his class with my wrists wrapped for practice, with my wrists wrapped for him, hoping he’d be the next person to bind me into peaceful submission. When I turned 18 he did confess that he would very much like to pin my wrists to a wall, to reinforce the bindings I dressed them in, that when I walked into class with my greatest assets so protected and my legs so bare under my skirt all he could think about was grabbing me and bending me to his will. 

“I’m a man. You’ve only been with boys. I can show you the difference. I know what I want, they don’t,” he said. I thought I loved him and I was wrong again. 

Cole told me that I broke down after staring at the jade bangle for too long during a Klonopin fog. In between fits of sobbing I’d tug at the bracelet and say that I had let down my father. I banged my arm against the bedpost and kept saying it over and over again. Cole held me down and twisted the bangle off of my wrist. I haven’t worn it much since then. 

A few weeks after the Klonopin episode Cole and I took a walk around the Sepulveda Basin. The Sepulveda Basin is a wildlife reserve in the Valley that looks like something out of a dystopian novel. There are endless Belvita breakfast wrappers and Monster energy cans and abandoned BuzzBalls in streams that have one inch of sluggishly running water. It’s built around a lake with fish that must surely be radioactive and geese who must multiply every week given the constant presence of yellow goslings on the bank. Cole and I had sex once in one of the lake lookouts by a marble slab with a depiction of the geese and a note delineating the measurement of the rising water level. He led me to the bench and lifted me gently on top of it then ran his hand down my spine. The moon was full that night and it reflected off of our hands intertwined on the concrete. We were in line with the marble slab and I thought I saw the lake ripple almost imperceptibly while he kneeled behind me and I bent over, half my torso dangling off a few feet above the water. What kind of alien creature could be birthed here, by the roar of the 405 and the gleaming lights of Target on Burbank Avenue? What kind of submission can create a heaven in a place like this? I’m bent over in prayer with Cole behind me. My mind empties and my eyes must reflect the moonlight, devoid of everything but that unlikely reverence. 

A particularly bad earthquake hit and the lookout is cracked down the middle now, the cement and the marble slumping into the sludge of the black lake. The bench my torso had dangled over is halfway into the water. Back home in lakes like this there are always gators. I’d walk on the bank by them with the men that I dated and stare into their yellow eyes. I felt them watching me with these men, felt them looking at me as I laid down with them in the grass, and it was the dull glow of their eyes that clouded everything when I would open my legs on the bank. The tadpoles and the geese in the Basin have no such blankness. The ruthlessness of existence, the stillness of eternity, captured in the swamps of Florida, could not be more different than the defiance of the animals that inhabit the Sepulveda Basin. I look out at that basin and I see God. 

I know it’s expected I’d say something about cutting my wrists now, but the truth is I was never much of a cutter. I only like self-inflicted pain that’s one step removed. I’m a coward. I need somebody else to do the hurting I seem to want so badly. The one time I had enough hatred to turn on my perfect wrists myself, a time I don’t even remember, a man—the counterpart I had up till then counted on to do what I was too much of a coward to do, the object of my affection I needed to be my warden— protected my greatest, most fragile assets, removed the shackle I wore with such pride.

Can there really be peace for me in freedom? Can I find God in such unlikely heaven? What does happiness look like for a creature like me? What kind of blankness do you see in my eyes? 

The man who took a knife to my wrist tells me he keeps the handcuffs he used on me in a box that he never opens. Those handcuffs are almost as familiar to me as the jade bracelet that’s stayed in a drawer in Cole’s desk for months now. I can roll my wrists out and imagine them there, cold against my skin. They look as perfect as ever.