Acts of Desperation

by Megan Nolan

I really was happy when I seemed happy.

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.

Being in love was like that to me, a shield, a higher purpose, a promise to something outside of yourself.

That night after meeting Ciaran I drank until I vomited and blood vessels beneath and above my eyes burst, and I traced them gently in the mirror, knowing they would be markers of a beginning.

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.

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.

There was no religion in my life after early childhood, and a great faith in love was what I had cultivated instead.

I love myself in love. I find my feelings fascinating and human, for once can sympathise with my own actions.

I think even then in that first flush, running up the quays alongside the April sunset, I was aware of that. It didn’t matter to me how funny he was, or what he thought of me, or what books we had both read. I was in love with him from the beginning, and there wasn’t a thing he or anybody else could do to change it.

I was not without value, but the value I held was not the kind I wanted to hold, and I did not know how to exchange it.

Being young and beautiful felt like a lot sometimes, felt like it translated to real-world power, but money shat all over it every time.

‘Me too,’ I said back, but I knew that I didn’t mean it. I hadn’t wanted to sleep with him. I had wanted never to sleep with him, had wanted us to keep talking, to wake up to his messages, to be amused by one another. I wanted our chaste coffee dates to go on and on, for there to be no end to these things, and this, the sex, was the end, I knew.

but I was filled with sadness at each new thing he did to me. Every thing he did was another ending.

His girlfriend, I thought, could be my mother’s age. 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. He called me a cab to go home and I knew I would never hear from him again and I never did.

Sometimes I thought about people like Lisa – people who never lost control of themselves, who never had too much of anything, who were never awake after one a.m. – with something like disdain. I valued what I thought of as my free nature, my willingness to do whatever I wanted at all times, my ability to be led by whatever base physical urge was singing to me in each moment. Wasn’t there some truth to the way I existed that those safer people were too timid to follow in their own lives?

In that moment I knew that Lisa, and only Lisa, was able to see me as I really was. She alone could see the reservoirs of need that existed in me and would never stop spilling out, ruining all they touched, and she didn’t hate me for them, but felt sorry for me.

We listened to records most evenings. He liked Bob Dylan and Hank Williams and so I did, too.

they’re not.’ ‘These people aren’t my friends. Just because you and I sleep together, it doesn’t make them my friends.’ I didn’t know how to respond to this. ‘Sleeping together’ was the least generous reading of what had been going on between us

I thought about this, about what the alternative was. I thought about Lutjeans being released from Burden’s grip and spinning to face him, searching his face, the second in which she had to decide whether to cry and scream at him, or to wink. What would you choose?

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.

There is good reason for not living inside your body all the time, and this event trapped me back in it for a long while, until I could struggle back outside again.

It would be easier if I could paint a line down the middle of the house, and have rape on one side and sex on the other. I have had sex without wanting to many times in my life. It was only once that I protested and was overpowered.

It wasn’t the lie that disturbed me, but how quickly I knew how to do it.

I knew it was childish, behaving this way, but it was painful to be reminded so casually that everything I cared about was subject to the whims of others.

Feeling this wrongness I knew it was true at last, and couldn’t believe it. I kept on stroking and stroking him, making deals with God. Thinking, If I stand here all night; thinking maybe if I stroked the awful, dead-thing stomach one thousand times exactly, thinking, Please, please, God, send him back to me, give him back to me, I won’t stop asking.

Some part of me had already decided to live for him and let him take over the great weight of myself.

glanced around and thought about eating some muesli when I saw Ciaran’s phone lying on the table. The sums were done in seconds.

I felt so lonely when I looked at them, remembering (but not quite clearly; through a veil) what they were experiencing; that part of being in love that makes inane experiences valuable.

a teenage girl’s body especially, how tedious and painful and punitive, and remember that sex might be the first time she realises that bodies can be made to feel good. That the million sensitive places which cause you to feel pain can also be sensitive to pleasure. That when you want to cry it will not always be from sadness.

There is no truce to be made with my body; if I make one, I know it will only be negated by a new enemy in time. What is the point?

but also with shame at how squalidly I was wasting my short life. I was sitting in a car with someone who loved me more than life itself, and yet all I could think about was Ciaran.

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

There was something intoxicating about being insulted that way, the total lack of respect, the lack of acknowledgement that I was there with him. It was the feeling that I could have been anyone, or no one, that I was something to be emptied into or out, the feeling of existing only to receive what he had to give.

I enjoyed my pain because it made me less than ever.

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.

Perhaps I had always been as violent as a man.

The picture I had made in my head of me showing up and everyone turning to applaud my newfound beauty had not been realised. I went home. I had made myself an image and it had not worked.

I felt proud and tearful every time I opened the wardrobe door, where his few pieces of clothing hung monastically next to my own bulk of old party dresses and garish sequinned sweatshirts.

Living with him forced me to treat myself like a person in a way I was not able to alone.

And after all, what individual had I been before? What identity was there to erase with my newfound house-pride? I had never found one resilient enough to live on in my memory once it had gone. There had never been one real enough to miss.

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

Then we went to bed, where I wished we could be always, where he felt finally and truly mine, the friendliness of a body’s smell and softness overpowering all the sour rest of him.

‘And… are you always like that, so nice to each other?’ he asked, and I was elated that this was the impression we had given off, that we were capable of such a thing, but then saw that there was something else in his expression, the gentle urgency of his face when I was a teenager and he wanted me to explain myself without wanting to force me to.

thudding. I was afraid to find what I knew I would find, which was that things had been ruined in the space of that minute, that I would spend the rest of the night trying to claw my way back to the good feeling, and that I would fail.

There is no better feeling to me than to wake up in the middle of the night and thrust my hand out and say, half in a dream still, ‘I love you so much,’ and for a person to turn towards me from muscle memory and say through their own sleep, ‘I love you too.’ There’s never been a drug or a friend or a food that’s even come close.

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’s a peculiar anger, resenting doing something that nobody asked you to do.

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.

‘Blood,’ he said. ‘That’s blood. That’s disease. That’s what happens when you don’t floss. Do you see now?’ And he cupped the back of my neck, not unkindly, and slowly forced my head down close to the spit, so I could see it clearly; it was an inch from my nose; I felt my throat rise. See?

looked forward to. Why didn’t I actually meet the friends I said I was going to? I could have, they were still around, were still willing to see me when I asked. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to see them. It was that I wanted it to be not true, where I was. I wanted there to be a thing he could not know.