Acts of Desperation

by Megan Nolan

How can I describe what happened to me without the word love?

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 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.

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

I was angry at having been made real in that way against my will.

My body was not glorious or miraculous or alive, it was just a thing of use. This did not sadden or surprise, so much as bore me:

I hadn’t known until that moment how delicately I had been keeping everything inside me together those last few months. My body felt as though it had been holding its breath for a very long time and had just realised it couldn’t do so for ever. What I was feeling was the failure of superstition and charms – the unreliability of prayer.

My body disgusted me when I was that age, but at the same time I was learning to love it – love it too much. I hated it but also worshipped it with an obscene devotion, because I knew what it was capable of inciting in myself and in others.

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.

I enjoyed my pain because it made me less than ever. I was nothing but living nerves, a petri dish of matter. I had no characteristics outside of it.

Life is long. I refracted his words and bent them back to mean something good for me.

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

Your disgust is domesticated. I fear that your distaste is that of your average husband – not the glittering and sexual kind you used to show me when you looked down at me, before I won you.

a hopeful prayer for adventure pranging in my chest, feeling seen, made real anew by all the people who look with admiration or curiosity; those exchanges making it seem as though I could be anyone at all, begin new stories, live a thousand lives.