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.

one of the girls who was more like a real girl to them, girls who were tall and willowy and part-time modelling while they studied fine art. I think that I wanted more than anything to be real like those girls, but I didn’t know how to be,

My life as a party girl dwindled away. I slept with too many people’s boyfriends, got sick in too many front rooms. I stopped being enjoyably fun and became only frantically fun, and then felt too old for it all anyway.

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.

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.

Every thing he did was another ending.

I thought a life that looked that way – clean and gentle and high-minded – would get me what I truly wanted, which was to do with having as much of people as possible, their attention, their desire, their curiosity.

I didn’t think so because it was incomprehensible to me that someone could drink and lack the desire to keep on drinking, I didn’t understand that some people didn’t have that want inside them.

she had remained single – actually single rather than single-and-dating – until she found someone right for her.

She had barely kissed anyone in the time I had known her and I wondered privately how she wasn’t bored or lonely, but I knew too that this was the better way to live. You earned the eventual love story with your restraint.

‘Did you want me to say I’m falling in love with you? Because I’m not.’

OH…

What would you choose? Either you can be famous for being a shrill prop in a great man’s work, a victim sacrificed to the gods of art, or you can nod along and applaud. You can have a seat at the big boys’ table for being such a good sport. So, go ahead: ha ha ha.

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. Being a victim is boring for everyone involved. It is boring for me to present myself through experiences which are instrumentalised constantly as narrative devices in soap operas and tabloids. Is this why I am so ashamed of talking about certain events, or of finding them interesting? This is part of the horror of being hurt generically. Your experiences are so common that they become impossible to speak about in an interesting way.

The act of unwanted sex was not what angered me most, but rather the tedious reminder that men can often do whatever they want and that some of them will.

suddenly it was clear that my intentions were meaningless, and I could no more magic him into loving me than I could an animal back to life.

She looked at us and said, “Aren’t you two the most beautiful couple I’ve ever seen,” and we laughed and she said, “Be good to one another” as she walked off. She could see how in love we were even at that distance, because everyone could.

GO BE TOGETHER THEN FUCK OFF. I would’ve beat the shit out of him…

I heard a rustling in the bedroom and quickly exited his email and shut the phone back off. I ran the tap and filled a glass with water and went back to the bedroom. I slid in beside Ciaran, my chin on his shoulder, hugging him from behind. He cast his arm backwards and held me to him.

We got away with it 😏

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.

When you fall in love with someone and your life is remade, you know instinctively that you must take great care of this delicate new world the two of you are building.

‘What do you want to eat?’ my mother asked. ‘Nothing,’ I said, ‘I’m just going to have chewing gum after school from now on.’ ‘Good girl,’

OH…

Even if my mother had never uttered a word about her body or mine, I think I would still feel this way when I come home, the same claustrophobic fury under that 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.

I called him constantly for the rest of the morning, knowing there would be no answer, but unable to stop myself.

Oh no..

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

how could a person be the way he was?

If I could just get him over the threshold, get him to step into my normal, same old room – if I could get him to sit on the bed we had slept and loved each other in, he would surely relent.

‘I never did really,’ he had told me. ‘I still don’t think of her that way. We had to leave each other, but you never know what’s going to happen later. Life is long.’ Life is long. I refracted his words and bent them back to mean something good for me. You never knew.)

😭

There’s something about a beautiful boy’s face – not handsome, or attractive, or cute, but beautiful.

A boy who is beautiful seems to have pushed through the mud and cement of his gender. His beautiful face seems carved out of the rawest materials.

There was something about such a face, in any case, which made me believe intuitively that the boy was good. If not on the surface, then in some other place you may have to dig down to find.

‘I need him. I need him,’ I sobbed to her. ‘I can’t do it. I’m not able to do it.’ Meaning to live, to go on living without him. And I loved her for not bothering to contradict me or to tell me that I didn’t need anybody, that I would get over it.

She knew intuitively, knew always, that she herself did not need anybody to live, but this difference between the two of us didn’t make my experience any less real than her own. She had seen how actual the need was with her own eyes.

The boys were as boring, as childish, as ever. They did not resemble the boys in films, all played by twenty-five-year-olds,

Listening to Bob Dylan, thinking of you. I miss you. His reply came a few hours later, by which time I had drunk everything in the house and was lying on my bed blindly watching television, saying only: I miss you too

Ykw… fuck it hell yeah

‘I thought we could sort of start again,’ he said, and then kissed me. I had won. And how did I win? Oh, in its way, it was easy – it was nothing; I was nothing. Two weeks later, we moved in together.