Acts of Desperation

by Megan Nolan

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.

All the suffering I had so far endured before I met Ciaran, I had endured like a child.

It was sort of amazing seeing men who weren’t particularly attractive but who believed, more or less correctly, that they could have and do whatever they wanted. I was always calculating with scientific precision the relative beauty of the people I wanted to be with, and would steer clear of the ones who exceeded me too greatly.

So it happened for Lisa, she made her own life, one that was happy and fully formed. Then Hen arrived into it and that was that. They were in love and there was nothing torturous or humiliating about it.

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.

Every day that passed in which I was easy to be with, and accommodating, and a good girlfriend, was a ritual offered up. My body expected the perseverance to mean something. And suddenly it was clear that my intentions were meaningless, and I could no more magic him into loving me than I could an animal back to life.

Some part of me had already decided to live for him and let him take over the great weight of myself. I was also so frightened of him and what he did to me that I could never admit this decision, inwardly or to him.

The damp heat he radiated was that of a child sweating out a fever. It is still especially easy for me to love him when I think of him this way. He seemed somehow pre-historic, still-becoming, an animal not yet ready to exist, with whom there is no point in being disappointed.

One of the saddest things to feel is that nothing in the world is new, that you have exhausted all your interactions with it. When I feel that way I wake each day into the already-dusky afternoon with deep regret that nothing has happened overnight to change me.

When you fall in love with someone and your life is remade, you know instinctively that you must take great care of this delicate new world the two of you are building.

Just as, in my younger days, my partying had seemed somehow important – seemed somehow to be getting at something bigger than other people were able to get at by doing the same thing – sex with Ciaran seemed important. It seemed each time to be driving towards a conclusion, and the conclusion would teach us something profound, if we ever arrived to it.

I’ve never understood how people can love their bodies, nor really understood how they can hate them either. I’ve always seen my body as nothing so much as deeply disturbing in its constant variance, a fluctuating, unmanageable thing that has basically nothing to do with me, is not really any of my business at all.

I sat staring into space for hours at a time, unable to move beneath the weight. I enjoyed my pain because it made me less than ever. I was nothing but living nerves, a petri dish of matter. I had no characteristics outside of it.

There’s something about a beautiful boy’s face – not handsome, or attractive, or cute, but beautiful. Why are they so moving, when I see so many beautiful girls every day? It isn’t fair, I know. A boy who is beautiful seems to have pushed through the mud and cement of his gender.

When Ciaran left me, I felt a comfort in how unendurable the pain was. If it couldn’t be endured, it would not be. It would end soon, one way or another.

I think, even now, if it was possible for me to have lived just like that, no other life coming in at the edges, no friends, no family, no work – if I had been successful in my attempt to boil my whole universe down just to us, burning bodies welded together in a cold bed – I could be happy there, still.

I wanted, I suppose, for him to need me, without knowing that it was me that he needed at all.

‘No money,’ he said cheerfully. Sometimes it seemed to me that he took pleasure in the fact he earned so little, that his ability to live without comforts and luxuries so exceeded everyone else’s.

A great fear swelled in my chest as I crouched there holding my body, my body, which felt to me so much to blame for everything that happened to me. In these moments I knew that if I could be smaller, smaller, less and less, if I could be tidied, then he would love me fully and properly; and that anybody – oh, everybody – would.

I didn’t want them, their sticky over-familiar comments, on me. I dreaded for them to see what I ate, to know what went inside me, because the more they knew the more I would be forced to sincerely inhabit the role I was playing, the harder it would become to tell the difference between the me in there and the me at home.

It was all so ordinary and underwhelming. They were just two idiots in a mess, who kept convincing and then un-convincing one another of things. They weren’t star-crossed, just dithering, dependent people who couldn’t stay away from each other because they hadn’t worked out how to imagine anything different.

I had been good for a long time. Now, the feeling I used to regularly have before I met him, the restless and soaring need for a big messy night, was back and it seemed to have been growing privately all that time.

‘This season’s looks lean towards Gothic drapery, knee socks and heavy eyeliner, showing something that every teenage girl knows: that sadness can be a kind of beauty.’

He smiled up at me from the bench and I was amazed, as I always was when I saw him again, to feel no differently towards him than when we first met. It always felt like a sleight of hand, a bit of magic, that we both still liked each other so much, that nothing had ever ruined things for us definitively.

‘This is so you,’ Reuben said. ‘What is?’ ‘You always think your pain is the most painful. You always think it’s uniquely awful.’

It wanted him to surrender to me, either to become totally loving, totally mine, or to play dominant in an overt and quantifiable way. But he just existed, passive and removed, fucking me in a way that reminded me of necessary tasks, of the way he ate – not without any pleasure, but even so, with a heavy sense of function. I could never get any closer to him, could never satisfy myself. And that made me want him more for years, had made me wild with violent need.

As the train pulled into Liverpool Street Station, light flooding down from the glass roof, I felt the incautious excitement I had as an eighteen-year-old moving to Dublin. That feeling of being young in a city, letting it do things to you, wanting to become something different in it.

The discrepancy between what was going on inside me and how good I looked made this power of mine seem infinite.

There was so much him to grapple with, what was in him was so crowded and chaotic and vibrant that it felt like I would never get bored of sorting through it.

I had been alone a long time by then and my loneliness was of a different nature to what it had been both before and during my relationship with Ciaran. It existed in a more permanent and peaceful way, felt like a thing that could reasonably be expected to be endured for ever.

Once you’ve said no, a man wheedling feels unbearable. Even if he does it politely, or gently, it overrides the clearly expressed intention. It says: Your choice does not really matter. What I desire matters, and I don’t want to feel bad for forcing you into it. So perhaps you ought to reconsider?

I knew then that Ciaran had not loved me. At least he didn’t love me in a right way, a way that had to do with who I was.