Acts of Desperation

by Megan Nolan

I loved them in an abstract way, but was happy for our relationships to be remotely maintained with the odd message, a brief appearance at birthday parties. I was embarrassed in front of them, and they shy with me. I knew what they thought of Ciaran, could sympathise with their reasons. I didn’t feel like suffering the further humiliation of trying to convince them he wasn’t what they thought.

Mm…

Because I knew that Freja looked at me too, I also looked at myself. I reviewed photos going back years and years. I tried to see myself as she saw me.

How jealously I regarded her beauty, her cleanliness and smell of fresh clothes and the way that boys loved her and the way she was appropriately removed from them. I was always down in the dirt. I envy women who are removed. I never really had that luxury.

There had been those times to prove to me that it wasn’t my fault or his that he made me feel so degraded and sad, but the fault of the whole rest of the world.

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

How lucky I have been that so much of my pain is from fearing the loss of what I already have, instead of suffering the absence entirely, as Ciaran did.

I talked to people I never usually talked to, surprised myself and them by being funny and personable and interested in what they had to say. Nothing works like drinking does.

I love to have sex, and that my love of it is not only about the act but about the multitude. I love the sex of knowing someone very well for years and just what will make them crumble and break open, but I also love to have sex with new people for not much more than their newness. I wish, when I leave them, that I could stay and sleep with them a hundred more times until I’ve exhausted all their strangeness, but I know too that the fact I can’t is what makes the meeting so sacred.

They said that meekness and submission would only drive men away, that confidence was attractive.

He did not love me – couldn’t, for what Me was there to love? What Me had he ever known? –

(I tried not to think, reproachfully, that perhaps his girlfriends cheated on him because of his penetrating coldness; but think it I did, and with balmy relief.)

My huge, ridiculous ego – the belief that I could stop and start the world with my presence.

‘Everything’s OK,’ he said. ‘And if it’s not, we’ll take care of it and then it will be.’

I was shocked that he was not impressed and cowed by my delicacy, as other boys had been. Why did he not find my frail, picturesque sadness alluring?

I was wallowing in the glamour of my sadness.

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

I would have carved his name all over me if I could have, if I thought it would make him happy.

Then my father called in July, telling me he had got the all-clear. He would not only live, he hadn’t been very sick at all. Everything was fine.

Aaayyyeee

He believed me. It was incredible the way he believed me.

😛

The way he was treating me would have made me so happy not long ago, the tenderness, the attention.

Part of what was between us was a conspiratorial acknowledgement that we were gross, that we were perverts, that it was nastiness bonding us together.

Omg

I was white and pink and in a thin blue dress which squarely framed the tops of my breasts and ended halfway down my thighs. I was strawberry ice cream, blue sky. I smelled so good it was crazy.

He was sun-beaten, handsomely haggard from living out of a suitcase and off booze and burgers, his skin tawny and tough like a farmer’s.

‘Do you think it would be possible for anyone to love you if they could see every single thing you do?’

‘Imagine that everyone could see everything. Every secret, every base physical ejection, every category of porn you’ve ever looked at in a kind of coma when you’re numb to the normal stuff. Think about it all. Every moment of shame, of desperation – do you really think anyone could love you still? Anyone at all?’

I was missing him, at that modest pain in me whenever I was missing a man. It felt like a correct pain, a baseline state, and that was what was making me cry – how right and comforting.

I wondered how they always knew that I was someone to be hurt.

(But that wouldn’t be like you, Ciaran would say if he heard. Hiking? And that would be the point – it wouldn’t be me at all any more.)

But I wouldn’t be young and alone – I would be young and on my way to someone else.

I would be leaving in desperation, not joy,

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.

I hate my weakness, what I severed of myself and gave to him, but love it too, love it still. I do not take it back. I love the girl who did those things. I love the girl because I feel sorry for her, and understand her.

Why not you now, Mark, when there have been so many others, and indeed you yourself have been one?

eventually I did what I had to do to stop him from wanting to have sex with me, which was to have sex with him.

I give so much pleasure to so many people. Why can’t I get some pleasure for myself?

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.

Your choice does not really matter. What I desire matters, and I don’t want to feel bad for forcing you into it. So perhaps you ought to reconsider?

Wheedling is cowardly, and violent. When you change someone’s no to yes by wheedling, you have stolen from them what does not belong to you.

As usual my body looked different to me after somebody had fucked it, more coherent than before.

I’d like to swim today, I thought.

I was happy, as I always am in the sea, the only place I have ever found where my body feels natural and mine and being used according to its intent. I am weightless but not insubstantial. I am always sure of what my body should be doing there. I feel seal-like, the fat I normally hate becomes sleek and normal in water, my inelegant body can be strong there.

I understood fully that certain weaknesses in others are intolerable – at least they are when you don’t love them.

When you love a person these things are nothing, or even lovable in and of themselves. But when you don’t love a person, they niggle at you. The person’s humanity is revealed too soon, before you can come to forgive it with love.

I knew then that Ciaran had not loved me. At least he didn’t love me in a right way, a way that had to do with who I was.

I remembered how much I had once loved to learn things.

I’d thought that a man’s love would make me so full up I’d never need to drink or eat or cut or do anything at all to my body ever again. I’d thought they’d take it over for me.