A Good Soak in Dublin

Taking a warm bath with my new wife on a rainy day in Dublin felt sweet. It had been twenty-three years since my last bath with a lady. At that time, I was a few weeks from graduating Skidmore College, and my body was a fit 175-pounds, but even so that bathing experience was a rare occurrence. Around this time, my mind was beginning to splinter and disintegrate with bipolar and the varied miseries that come with it. 
As I struggled over the coming years, I didn’t lose my interest in the opposite sex or bathing with them. It’s just that I became a sick and morbidly obese, and that brought about a drastic decrease in me stepping into tubs and having women want to take a soak with me.
I’ve also had a long history of hanging around mental health facilities and bleeding frequently from self-inflicted wounds. In those many years at hospitals and group homes, I found friendship and some love relationships with harried beauties, and took passing stabs at kissing and fondling, but no young girl, no matter how tragic, desperate or disturbed, wished to bathe with a 400 pound man in a claw-footed tub. First, let’s dispatch with the near impossibility of wedging and splashing around with me in that cramped space.
The odd thing about this more recent bathing experience, the thing that kept tripping me up, is that I’m still a pretty fat guy, even though I’m no longer pushing 400 pounds. On our Irish honeymoon, I tipped the scales at a still-whopping 303. And yet, I never felt so at peace with myself, so relaxed as I did that afternoon in Dublin. It was the first time I experienced that in my 46 years.
Before then, something was always chipping away at my brain – some crippling anxiety, odd behavior, or being depressed and delusional right out of college. My life then became a decade and a half slog through the intricate, sticky tendrils of the psychiatric realm as my struggle with self-harm left me nearly incapacitated. 
Eventually – finally – I started to see color beyond myself in the tulips around New Haven, and I slowly healed and was ready to recover and rebuild what romance skills I had left.
I also decided I should, at the very least, try dating someone whose personality couldn’t be found in a section of the DSM-V, Psychiatric manual. I got myself out there and the women I met were understandably freaked out by my history and said things like, “Honey, I’m just getting over a man with too much baggage so it wouldn’t be fair to you or me to get involved.”
With others, it was the same deal - we’d fool around for a while and then things would cool, and they’d start hedging their affections. Some of that was a simple lack of chemistry, but I got used to hearing the same line when their fingers outlined the scars on my body.  It didn’t take long for their immediate cease and retreat.
Then I met Amy. It was a wonderful moment that began on our first date when I saw the prominently displayed Batman Band-Aid on her finger. I learned she was quirky in other ways also – loved comic book films, and violent movies with a substantial amount of explosions, along with taking on eleven-year old boys at Laser Tag and ruining them. She’s a talented photographer, and also a growing expert in graphic design, and investment real estate in Hartford.  
When she heard my story, she didn’t run away. She traced the intersecting lines of my scars and asked her questions.  
            “What are those marks on your arm?”
            “I used to cut myself.”
Next query was the one that held the weight of the world. 
            “Are you finished with it?”
            “Forever,” I said.
Granted, she checked later that week with a psychiatric professional about bipolar 2 patients and just how stable and healthy a soul could be, especially one who you used to run razors through portions of his body. Amy later told me that someone’s future is not necessarily determined by their past.
Now, how do you argue with a girl like that?

Originally published:
Huffpost.com
June 2012