Acts of Desperation

by Megan Nolan

Nobody so beautiful could live with us.

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?

By this I don’t mean that I felt myself to be above him. For almost our entire life together I would consider Ciaran to be better than me in both essential and superficial ways.

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

His body would become a site of prayer for me, a place where I could forget about my own living flesh and be only with his. It was a thing of total pleasure, total beauty.

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

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 could not be alone happily, and because I knew this was a sign of weakness, I forced myself to endure it for as long as I could before breaking, although I sometimes thought I would go mad.

Being in love was like that to me, a shield, a higher purpose, a promise to something outside of yourself.

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

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.

I understood even the most inexplicable of tragedies as being imbued with some as yet unknown purpose.

My misery seemed to come from knowing I was not good enough to warrant the objectively lucky life I had been given.

Love was the great consolation, would set ablaze the fields of my life in one go, leaving nothing behind. I thought of it as the great leveller, as a force which would clean me and by its presence make me worthy of it.

I love myself in love. I find my feelings fascinating and human, for once can sympathise with my own actions.

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 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.

I think that I wanted more than anything to be real like those girls, but I didn’t know how to be, didn’t know any other way to be close to these boys except for partying with them. I was not without value, but the value I held was not the kind I wanted to hold, and I did not know how to exchange it.

I was young enough to be compelling to them by virtue only of my youth, standing in as a monument to whatever things they felt they no longer had access to.

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.

It felt good in a way, because he was so excited and I was pleased to make him so, but I was filled with sadness at each new thing he did to me.

Here was an actual life, a real life, which I had walked into, dragging the mud of myself with me. I had never felt so unlike a human being, so disposable and flimsy and built purely for function.

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.

but I knew too that this was the better way to live. You earned the eventual love story with your restraint.

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.

‘What?’ he said. ‘Did you want me to say I’m falling in love with you? Because I’m not.’ ‘No,’ I said, and feeling that I had no more energy to do whatever we were doing, I turned and walked towards home.

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.

There is good reason for not living inside your body all the time, and this event trapped me back in it for a long while, until I could struggle back outside again.

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.

They had been bound up in each other so inextricably he didn’t think they could ever get away from each other.

He pressed his burning forehead to mine and we closed our eyes and were together.

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

Some part of me had already decided to live for him and let him take over the great weight of myself. I was also so frightened of him and what he did to me that I could never admit this decision, inwardly or to him.

It is still especially easy for me to love him when I think of him this way. He seemed somehow pre-historic, still-becoming, an animal not yet ready to exist, with whom there is no point in being disappointed.

Couples will often disappear together for months in their beginning stages, which is not just about lust but also about building.

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?

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. How dare you? I want to scream at her, on the one hand; I love you so much! I’m sorry, on the other.

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

I didn’t want a goodbye, had no interest in a respectful parting. I only thought if I could make him concede, treat me like a person, touch me, the spell would be broken and he would love me again.

The loss of someone you love can make you go mad in the best of circumstances.

Losing someone you love in those ways can turn you not only mad but wicked too.

When once I gasped, ‘I’m alone, I’m so alone, I’m scared,’ she didn’t pretend that I wasn’t. ‘I know you are,’ she agreed. ‘You are.’

It seemed to sum up all the ways in which men could take you without your permission and turn you into something you had never been, which had nothing to do with you.

A cigarette dangles from her mouth – she looks like Patti Smith or a particularly pretty Manson girl.

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.

Sometimes it seemed to me that he took pleasure in the fact he earned so little, that his ability to live without comforts and luxuries so exceeded everyone else’s.

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.

You hate me, I thought sometimes, when you see me drink or cry or cut myself, but you don’t hate me in the right way.