Acts of Desperation

by Megan Nolan

I do not understand what I do; for I don’t do what I would like to do, but instead do what I hate. What an unhappy man I am. Who will rescue me from this body that is taking me to death? –Romans 7:15–25

I couldn’t stand to live with her any longer after the way she had looked at me that morning, but nor could I bear for her to drop me. 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.

I know it is unfashionable to describe rape as sex (the implication being that rape is a violent, rather than a sexual act; can’t it be both? And sometimes more one than the other?) but it felt very much like sex to me. From a purely physical point of view it didn’t even feel very different to some of the worse consensual sex I had had, those times where I had realised immediately that I would rather not continue, but did so to be polite, feigning enjoyment to make it end quicker.

My mind was working double-time to selectively absorb and reject the various things he was telling me. He was sorry: good. He was opening up about his past: good. He loved her: bad. ‘Yes,’ I said, trying to be mature.

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

Anti-depressants come and go, making little difference either way to the fact that my reaction to all of life, all of God’s green earth, all of mankind, is often: So? And then, whenever I fall in love, everything is made new, including myself. My body, my brain, the way I see the simplest things. 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.

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. Laughing at getting rained on instead of it just being a minor pain on your way somewhere else. And even after, when they were just sitting eating sandwiches and drinking coffee, their contentment was amazing to see. I had forgotten that love has the power to do that.

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. How am I supposed to accept or like or hate or be neutral about a thing that will not stay the same? How can I maintain consistent feelings towards a changing thing like that?

And at home there is my mother. Around her I am ever more nauseated by myself. There are the usual itemised wrongs in my head, the ones I might trot out to a therapist, throwaway comments she made when I was at formative ages. She was always somewhat mad about her own body, but especially when she was young and single and probably driven to distraction with a whiny child and little idea of what the rest of her life might look like, if it would be any good. She said these things without any meanness or vitriol, said them in the same chipper conversational way she said most everything, but of course I remember them.

The split in me was so wide that these two states could coexist: 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. It was only that other people would be incapable of understanding the way in which objective reality did not account for its essential truth.

‘You gave me this, you told me you loved me, a week ago!’ I was screaming now and along with everything else I hated him for making me into this. I felt crushed with the sudden certainty that I was the crazy one.

I looked for other people who had felt like me, hoping for comfort or clues. My search terms were things like ‘Obsessive love’, ‘Famous cases of unrequited love’, ‘Incidents of obsession’.

and when I was inclined to cut myself I was overcome by lethargic refusal and never followed through with it.

I listened to sad songs in the shower and cried along. Sometimes I would stop and see myself as from the outside and even laugh at such trite performances of heartbreak.

I would not allow him to be gone from me for ever. That was why I was unable to mourn authentically, how I could keep from abandoning myself.

And afterwards, if I was able to have sex with him too, things were OK. When we had sex he forgave me, even when he didn’t want to.

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.

prurient lust

passably convivial.

Towards the end of the evening I absent-mindedly chewed on a thumb hangnail and Ciaran took my wrist and withdrew it from my face without breaking his conversation with Dad. It was a thing I wouldn’t have noticed or would have been even slightly pleased with, a cosy action, if we were not in company, but I met my father’s eyes as he did it and dropped my hands to my lap, and then sat on them.

‘Did I do something?’ I asked a few minutes later, after he had begun to read. ‘What are you talking about?’ ‘You seem upset with me.’ ‘I’m not upset with you.’ He kept his eyes on the book. ‘I’m not anything with you.’ ‘Why aren’t you talking to me?’ ‘Why do I have to be talking to you? I don’t have to be talking to you to not be upset with you. Do I have to talk to you all fucking day and night? We live together, I’m here all the time, I can’t talk for all of it just to keep you amused. Christ, it’s like living with a toddler sometimes.’ I nodded, knowing that it was. I started to cry. ‘I’m sorry, Ciaran. I’m really sorry.’ ‘What are you crying about? This is insane, you know that, right? You’re making yourself cry right now, about absolutely nothing. You’re crying about the absence of me being upset with you.’ ‘I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I know. Just – please, can you please, please—’ And because I didn’t know what the end of the sentence was, what I was pleading for, it just kept going, I kept asking, and asking, and asking.

and I tried not to apologise again, knowing it would make things worse.

Many nights I spent doubled up on the bathroom floor. I didn’t lock myself in to protect myself from him. I did it when I had begged him to forgive me, answer me, acknowledge me, and he would not. Sometimes this lasted for hours, and to punish us both for that humiliation I locked in and began to cut myself. ‘What are you doing in there?’ I imagined him saying, knocking on the door. ‘Please, don’t hurt yourself.’ I wished he would do as an old long-ago boyfriend once had – had grabbed my scarred and crusting forearms together, which were then as rickety and pale as ossified twigs, and looked me urgently in the eye and said, ‘I want you to promise me you will never do this again.’

But nothing came from Ciaran. Nothing came, and it had become impossible to hurt myself with the convincing rage I once had. I had grown reflexively weak and self-protective, not able, as I was back then, to harm myself without thought, without fear of the pain that would follow whenever I showered or dressed in the days to come. Inside me things were boiling and rupturing and sprouting, and twenty feet away he sat looking out the window, calmly smoking, with a book resting on his lap, an indefinite horizon of stillness, silence. 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.

It wasn’t that, on balance, there were more good times with Ciaran than bad, and that’s why I stuck around. 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.

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.

So what? I thought, scrolling. I needed more, to be hurt more. I wanted to see that they continued to cheat, that they were planning to run away together, that they wanted to kill me. I wanted lists of every flaw in my body, every way in which I was laughable and the object of their amused pity. 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.

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. I could not bear to watch a film with Ciaran sometimes – wasn’t able to relax for the two hours in which he was seeing a person who was better to look at than me. I clawed my thighs slowly and deeply beneath the duvet. In my head I swore off sugar, milk, bread, anything that might nourish me. I vowed to wake at five a.m. and do sit-ups until I couldn’t breathe.

People said that you had to be yourself, and be strong and independent to be in love. They said that meekness and submission would only drive men away, that confidence was attractive. But I had done it, had worn him down with weakness. He did not love me – couldn’t, for what Me was there to love? What Me had he ever known? – but he had become attached to me, dependent on me. I had carefully created a circumstance in which a kind of love could be bred in him, like a scientist manipulating lab conditions. I had exhausted his reserves, eroded his natural resistance, and now I was finished.

We broke up six months later because of me. I was unhappy even then, even when I was blissfully happy with him. I was already deeply into my cutting and starving. I knew enough to keep that hidden from him at first, and then I slowly forgot. I began to confide in him how I felt, my inability to function, what I was driven to do to myself. It upset him. He was harsh with me – harsh for him, anyway. ‘You can’t complain about feeling bad, about being depressed, if you aren’t trying to sleep, trying to eat, trying to care about yourself.’ I found this outrageous.

‘This is so you,’ Reuben said. ‘What is?’ ‘You always think your pain is the most painful. You always think it’s uniquely awful.’ I stared back at him mutely (even then aware of how my face became prettier in vacancy, even then parting my lips and sweetly widening my eyes in surprise). He laughed. ‘It’s fine. I’m not giving out. I know you; I know this is what you’re like. It’s just – you’ve barely asked about me. You have no idea what’s going on in my life. You never really have.’ ‘Tell me,’ I said, face moving closer. ‘No! I’m not going to list all the things wrong with my life so you can take them in and then compare them to yourself.’ It was bad, what he was saying, and true, but he was smiling as well. ‘I don’t know how you get away with it,’ he said, still smiling and shaking his head, and then I kissed him.

Life was so pointless, so opaque and shifting, that I could only think about immediate feelings. Immediacy was all I had.

I 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. When they speak this way I am even less in my body than usual, feeling the sickness of a stranger look me in the eye and describe what is not there. What I am feeling is their disregard for my reality. I am being made to wear whatever particular fantasy they wish to project. Each time it happens I have to restrain myself from screaming in their faces to prove I am not what they believe me to be. In these moments I am happy with my ugliness and want them to see it. Whatever badness I am I want to be it, to be as much like whatever my self is as possible; as far from the stranger’s projection as possible.

That night Mark kissed me and I let him. It was the easy thing to do, the only thing to do. The idea of telling him not to and the ensuing conversation filled me with weariness. I wondered how many times in my life I had made this calculation, how the men would feel if they knew, if they would care.

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.