Acts of Desperation

by Megan Nolan

It was, I think, that loss of control he hated above all. To see an adult really cry is a perverse experience. The wailing adult is both childlike and pathetically defeated in a way that is alien to childhood (cursed by the breadth of their experience, lacking the single-minded purity of a child’s grief).

That when you want to cry it will not always be from sadness.

shared roof, the two of us so close together. I came from her, she made this body-thing I hate and love so much. I resent her for producing it; I’m mortified I have made such poor use of it. How dare you? I want to scream at her, on the one hand; I love you so much! I’m sorry, on the other.

The frenzied certainty that a terrible thing had taken place was stronger now, but no longer was the terrible thing a cracked skull or a blocked windpipe. The terrible thing was a mystery now. I could focus only on the immediate.

How impoverished my internal life had become, the scrabbling for a token of love from somebody who didn’t want to offer it.

irritated myself as I wrote it, the ‘very much’ shrill and manipulative.

I was putting off the moment of unlocking my door and stepping in to the emptiness and having whatever was happening happen to me.

It was amazing, remarkable to me even through the sickening shock of it; how could a person be the way he was?

I felt crushed with the sudden certainty that I was the crazy one. What I thought had happened could not have happened.

There was something intoxicating about being insulted that way, the total lack of respect, the lack of acknowledgement that I was there with him.

Life is long. I refracted his words and bent them back to mean something good for me. You never knew.)

I arrived to the dance and it was terrible. The boys were as boring, as childish, as ever.

When he left me, I didn’t contact him, partly because I knew there was no point and partly because I was convinced that she would see any message I sent. I could not bear to think of them laughing at me, or worse, shaking their heads in sympathy.

I never knew if he referred to Freja as ‘a friend’ in this way because he thought I was too dense to understand who he meant, or whether it came from a reluctance to say her name aloud, as if by doing so he would give her a way into our home.

It took a very long time for me to resent this part of our life. It was almost the last thing to go.

didn’t feel like suffering the further humiliation of trying to convince them he wasn’t what they thought.

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

Gir get a grip

Women who once were individuals despair of being made into nothing more than wife, housekeeper, mother – a person whose identity is secondary to their ability to make things easier for everyone

in the heated flush of those first months we lived together, it felt sexy and intimate and even profound.

cant relate queen

First it was only when I was with him – we would pass a pretty girl, I would notice her first, and my eyes would dart to his to see him clock her. Every time he did, I experienced it as a betrayal, but I also gloated inwardly that I had learned who would attract his attention in this way.

my mind wandered towards them in the invasive and probing manner I associate with the masculine thrusting of penetrative sex.

Lol she is soooo insane but i get it

but I was in love and so I was insane,

A least she is aware

That the pain was private made it better – I made them torture me, without their consent.

She is leaning back against a chair splaying her legs like a man would, a pose which could only look beautiful on the elegant and thin.

they were unbearably male evenings. I was often the only woman and got used to being ignored and spoken over.

A lot of the time it was going back over old ground. She didn’t update very often and I had worked my way back through the four years of existing material. But I could never exhaust this bloody desire to examine her, to work my way inside her, to perceive her as he perceived her.

The stories made me feel bored and hopeless.

He makes people feel that their lives are unique and worthy of interest, which, although true, is something rarely felt by ordinary people.

The parallels between her dad and bfafre so crazy shes really sef destructive

‘I’m so sorry,’ I said. ‘What are you sorry for?’ I didn’t know.

self. I thought of the way we had lived together. We were autonomous, could happily go whole days without speaking to each other, me reading on the couch and her drawing at the table, passing cigarettes back and forth.

And yet there was such pleasing self-containment, too. The combined force of ourselves made the silence rich, made the rooms we shared into a home. We had done together what I had never managed to do with Ciaran.

But still. I couldn’t go out. I couldn’t be absent when Ciaran arrived in or, worse still, couldn’t be here and pissed when he did.

stand up girl

I craved with visceral, addict thirst the experience of buying a frozen pizza and a bottle of wine and not thinking remotely of anyone else.

He emailed me studies about young professional women developing cirrhosis,

Wtf

The songs I listen to, all attached to someone I’ve been obsessed with.

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

I had given up so much to be a part of this drama and I saw now how bad the part, how shoddy the script.

Then he recovered and remembered that the way to hurt me is to ignore me.

but he had become attached to me, dependent on me.

He was shy, reluctant or unable to name what we had together.

Shelovessssss an avoidant

That was when it should have ended. It seems insane to me now that I somehow went on, but I believed still that I loved him and that the cheating was a symptom of my innate foulness.

Girllllllll

That feeling of being young in a city, letting it do things to you, wanting to become something different in it.

I thought then that that was all those times were: relief. They were always relief from the absence of what I feared, the ordinary, truly daily things: the coldness, and the ignorance, and the disdain, and the hatred. The chiding and the shaping of me, the backhanded compliments and barbed advice.

The pleasure wasn’t often pleasure; it was release from pain. It was binding yourself and feeling good when the bandages came off, it was cutting a hole in your leg so you could feel it heal.

Is it brave to be alone? Maybe, in a way. But it was also brave to ask someone to be with me, even though it was the wrong person, and in the wrong way. How could I have asked him to love me, day after day, when the answer kept on being no? What desperation made me live that way?

I don’t think you deserve it. Don’t think you deserve me. I think your little pantomime of friendship and desire is weak and pallid.

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.

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?

We sat in companionable silence on the tram journey, I felt sorry for him that I hated him so much.

As I undressed on the beach he told me he couldn’t really swim very well; he was fine to a certain point but didn’t like to go in very far. ‘Fine, that’s OK, don’t worry,’ I said brusquely, not caring what he was or wasn’t able to do.