Acts of Desperation

by Megan Nolan

He sought nothing from his surroundings.

By pity, what I mean is that just by looking at him I felt an acute tenderness for his condition: his being human. In that moment the basic affection and sorrow I feel for any human person was intensified to such a degree I could not breathe.

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.

I laughed at this nervously and shook my head, filled with affection for myself. I love myself in love. I find my feelings fascinating and human, for once can sympathise with my own actions.

I told him I wrote, too, in the way I always told people this: with the lowered pious eyes of a saint, looking away, worried and secretly a little hopeful they would want to ask me about it.

I knew that it could never happen that way for me because I couldn’t spend a day, much less a series of years, without looking around me for someone to feel things about.

My mind was working double-time to selectively absorb and reject the various things he was telling me.

(What could people be expected to tolerate of me? How much of what I needed could I reasonably demand?) (Nothing, nothing, nothing.)

but it was painful to be reminded so casually that everything I cared about was subject to the whims of others.

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.

He ignored me, which I could tolerate, in that moment even enjoyed, the better to demonstrate how quiet and good I could be.

He seemed somehow pre-historic, still-becoming, an animal not yet ready to exist, with whom there is no point in being disappointed.

And the best part is it doesn’t even have to be the first time to work. If I fuck it up once, the next time works just as well.

sex with Ciaran seemed important.

I slept for twelve hours straight, as I often did when I first came home, as though recovering from having to be alive on my own all year round.

or eat everything, showing her that I am past that, I have transcended her petty concerns, I am mind, not body, I am better than her.

1. I knew that my relationship was strange and uneven and not reciprocal and that speaking about its reality would confuse and upset people who loved me. 2. I didn’t feel it to be those things. That is, I could understand that a truthful account of it, according to actual events, would sound disturbing, but I did not feel disturbed by it.

I held out the amber to him as though it was a talisman, as though it could summon something from within him.

erotomania,

Sometimes I would stop and see myself as from the outside and even laugh at such trite performances of heartbreak.

A blissful patience swam through me, the certainty that I could wait for ever.

That something as vast and daily and necessary as eating became a responsibility that I willingly took on for him, and he willingly gave up to me?

He didn’t demand or expect these reparations. I knew instinctively to use them.

But I was not a mother. Doing everything for one other person, one man – in the heated flush of those first months we lived together, it felt sexy and intimate and even profound.

but I was in love and so I was insane,

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

What would hold me down any more, what would make me real? I felt that I would simply float away, that there would be nothing left of the thing I called Me before Ciaran.

We broke up six months later because of me.

But it was enough, or almost, to know that he was alive and that he loved me.

‘You always think your pain is the most painful. You always think it’s uniquely awful.’

I wanted to be the one who could shatter his outside and get to the good parts,

I knew as soon as he asked that I would go to see him, I could not imagine not doing it.

He made the world itself seem good and ripe and ready to be run towards, he made me feel funny and new and fizzing, and like he wouldn’t even need to be there for that to be true.

Why was it that nobody ever thought to ask me in which way I wanted to be hurt, or for how long, or how hard?

I would love him because of his expansiveness, his open heart and greedy appetites. I wouldn’t want to contain him.

The pleasure wasn’t often pleasure; it was release from pain.

It made me so happy that soon I was crying at the luck I’d had in getting here, how lucky I was to be on my own at last, even when it hurt.

What would I think about, now that I wasn’t thinking about love or sex?