Acts of Desperation

by Megan Nolan

He was very tall and had the bad posture of someone who became so tall early and tried to hide it.

The thing to understand about Ciaran is not only that he was exceptionally beautiful, but that there was an immense stillness radiating from his body.

Although he didn’t seem particularly happy, he seemed undeniably whole, as though his world was contained within himself.

Is it possible to love someone without knowing them, by sight? How can I describe what happened to me without the word love?

In that moment the basic affection and sorrow I feel for any human person was intensified to such a degree I could not breathe.

Ciaran was not the first beautiful man I slept with, or the first man I had obsessive feelings for, but he was the first man I worshipped.

GIRL GET THE FUCK UP

What must it feel like to be beautiful but also invisible whenever you choose to be? To be a beautiful man?

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.

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.

I, like most of my friends, was a good drunk, by which I mean I could drink a lot, liked to drink, and wasn’t disagreeable once drunk.

😛

Why do you do it? Because I like to. Meaning, not so much that I take pleasure in it, but: I choose it.

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.

She’s cooking…

As we walked in opposite directions, I turned back to look at him over my shoulder and he did the same to me and I was filled with a soaring levity.

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 had become a strange age. I was no longer the barely-legal-but-knowing teenager who had wielded such power over men. Nor was I anything like a self-possessed adult woman who might attract them by way of her autonomy.