Acts of Desperation

by Megan Nolan

I knew it was childish, behaving this way, but it was painful to be reminded so casually that everything I cared about was subject to the whims of others.

It never succeeded in eliciting any good or compassionate feeling, and yet I kept doing it. I never wanted to.

all potential intrusions rendered laughably unreal.

How am I supposed to accept or like or hate or be neutral about a thing that will not stay the same?

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.

Sometimes this distance between everyone comforted and pleased me. I would die knowing things about myself that nobody else on earth did. There were experiences that lived only in me and could never be replicated or recounted. And sometimes, like now, the distance seemed too sad to live with.

he put his hand on my wrist and said, ‘It’ll be OK,’ and I was sad for him that he had had a child at all if it meant his happiness was tied to mine always. I was sad I wasn’t able

to learn to be happier, more regular and peaceful, because it meant he would never have that peace for himself, which he of all people deserved and had waited for.

There was something intoxicating about being insulted that way, the total lack of respect, the lack of acknowledgement that I was there with him. It was the feeling that I could have been anyone, or no one, that I was something to be emptied into or out, the feeling of existing only to receive what he had to give.

Living with him forced me to treat myself like a person in a way I was not able to alone.

That the pain was private made it better – I made them torture me, without their consent.

And so sex was what I could count on, a definite expression of my purpose.

I think that my easy offering of myself to others is a way to dispute this pain, to fight with myself.

I would love to have one moment of want in my life when I am sure what I’m feeling is all my own and nothing to do with men,

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

That feeling of being young in a city, letting it do things to you, wanting to become something different in it.

I’ll want to remember what it was like to have a body that couldn’t be denied or regarded with ambivalence. I’ll miss all of it, even the secrets, even the lies.

Why does it take this to make me feel myself? I was so myself, thinking of nobody but myself, I was nobody at all but myself in those moments.

Think about it all. Every moment of shame, of desperation – do you really think anyone could love you still? Anyone at all?’

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.

What I am feeling is their disregard for my reality.