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where I could forget about my own living flesh and be only with his. It was a thing of total pleasure, total beauty.
What must it feel like to be beautiful but also invisible whenever you choose to be? To be a beautiful man?
I really was happy when I seemed happy. I am incapable of lying about my feelings, it’s only that the feelings have no coherence, are not continuous from one hour to the next.
Being with other people was, to me, the feeling of being realised. This was why I wanted to be in love. In love, you don’t need the minute-to-minute physical presence of the beloved to realise you. Love itself sustains and validates the rotten moments you would otherwise be wasting while you practise being a person, pacing back and forth in your shitty apartment, holding off till seven to open the wine.
sordid checkpoints of the wounded woman.
Female suffering is cheap and is used cheaply by dishonest women who are looking only for attention – and of all our cardinal sins, seeking attention must surely be up there.
I understood even the most inexplicable of tragedies as being imbued with some as yet unknown purpose.
My understanding was that every action would lead me to where I ought to be ultimately, and where I ought to be was in love.
Here was an actual life, a real life, which I had walked into, dragging the mud of myself with me. I had never felt so unlike a human being, so disposable and flimsy and built purely for function.
I thought a life that looked that way – clean and gentle and high-minded – would get me what I truly wanted, which was to do with having as much of people as possible, their attention, their desire, their curiosity.
I didn’t want her near me, because she was the only one able to see me for what I was, but I couldn’t lose her for the very same reason.
Mediating your own victimhood is just part of being a woman. Using it or denying it, hating it or loving it, and all of these at once. Being a victim is boring for everyone involved. It is boring for me to present myself through experiences which are instrumentalised constantly as narrative devices in soap operas and tabloids. Is this why I am so ashamed of talking about certain events, or of finding them interesting? This is part of the horror of being hurt generically. Your experiences are so common that they become impossible to speak about in an interesting way. If I want to say something
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I said through my huddling and hiding that I was nothing, and I was happy to be nothing if nothing was what pleased him best. If nothing was the least trouble, then I would be it, and gladly. I would be completely blank and still if that was what worked, or as loud as he needed me to be to take up his silences. I would be energetic and lively if he was bored, and when he tired of that, I would become as prosaic and dully useful as cutlery.
The need was a true and human part of me, but I could feel nothing else of myself to be true or human, and so the need seemed ungodly, an aberration.
I wake so late because although I can’t stand to be conscious, I can’t stand to try to sleep either.
Afternoons, which I might otherwise spend cowering alone in bed hiding from errant sunlight coming through the curtain, I now might spend feeding ducks and reading poetry by the canal. A transformation which is the nearest to actual magic I have ever come.
It was disturbing, as it always was to be made aware that people with their own internal lives and individual perspectives existed all around you.
felt so lonely when I looked at them,
Getting apples and walking around was the point, just that, that was the whole point. That was more than enough.
I wished I could unburden myself but I couldn’t verbalise what was happening because doing so would bring it into existence.
It had been like this when I was a teenager. My depressions were without source or resolution, and so I had no real answer to the question ‘What’s wrong?’
How impoverished my internal life had become, the scrabbling for a token of love from somebody who didn’t want to offer it.
I would move with him anywhere on earth and need nothing.
The first time I heard the story I felt angry. To demand ownership of a woman who doesn’t love you, even when she is dead. To take that dead body and make it yours through hideous force, hideous care, hideous attention. It seemed to sum up all the ways in which men could take you without your permission and turn you into something you had never been, which had nothing to do with you.
Every so often I would let myself become upset, would sit in bed with my back to the wall and head cradled in my knees. When the pain reached its pitch I would bang my head behind me twice in quick succession, hard enough to manufacture the feeling that my brain was being physically dislodged and to scare and then calm me. But those evenings were rare, and mostly I was too shocked to feel anything too intensely, for which I was grateful.
The picture I had made in my head of me showing up and everyone turning to applaud my newfound beauty had not been realised.
In that moment I was as happy as I have ever been, sure that the abundance and purity of love I felt was obvious in every way, through my waiting and my tininess, my forgiveness and willingness to be pathetic. I was the woman. I had suffered. I was there.
Our books lived alongside each other, but did not mix, a mutual invasion too far even for me.
If he got something out of me, I was taking something from him, too. I was taking away his ability to live without me easily. I subbed his rent, I cooked his food, I cleaned his clothes, so that one day soon there would come a time when he could no longer remember how he had ever done without me, and could not imagine doing so ever again.
but I was in love and so I was insane,
I envy women who are removed. I never really had that luxury.
It’s a peculiar anger, resenting doing something that nobody asked you to do. And it’s a peculiarly impotent sort of anger that domestic labour brings about. It was building up in me, a feeling like the blood of my body slowly becoming dirty as it coursed through.
And, too, it amazed me to conceive of her out there in the world living luridly but still the object of his love and fascination. I was here, in the home, safe and useful as a sink.
How lucky I have been that so much of my pain is from fearing the loss of what I already have, instead of suffering the absence entirely, as Ciaran did.
I soaked up their attention, hoping they envied me, wanting to eat that up, the brief thrill of feeling better than them.
For someone I love to prefer another woman to me, to choose her body over mine even in the abstract, was once the most vile experience I could imagine.
Those moments have been the rawest, most tender flaying of myself, a return to the simplicity of what I know to be more or less the point of life, of coming together with another person without care
for what the next day will bring, unexpected connection without fear.
We should, after all, have our own desires, free of men!
I would love to have one moment of want in my life when I am sure what I’m feeling is all my own and nothing to do with men,
A punishment for ignoring my family; a punishment for needing only someone who could not see me, instead of needing the people who could.
Nobody who loves me from now on will ever know, really know, really believe, that I was a beautiful child once.
You have to hope that he died still thinking that somebody loved him in the way he had wanted to be loved.
I had suffered, and I had made the suffering into something I could consider good. I made it so that suffering was a kind of work.
want to break up,’ I said.
hate now for men to dote in this way, the ones who don’t know me. Their praise lands uncertainly in the air somewhere between the two of us, because it doesn’t belong to me. I hate to hear them tell me what I am, even or especially when what they think I am is kind or brilliant or beautiful. I hate when they insist that I have no faults, that my laziness or violence or cruelty simply don’t exist.
feeling the sickness of a stranger look me in the eye and describe what is not there.
I was braver every day I got up the next morning and went to work.
It was already so near to impossible to say no to a man, so difficult to accept the possibility of being hurt or disliked or shouted at. It takes so much out of you to make yourself say no when you have been taught to say yes, to be accommodating, to make men happy.
I hate them less afterwards, because I’ve made myself as pathetic as they are.
