Acts of Desperation

by Megan Nolan

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.

It was as they said it would be, and I knew that it could never happen that way for me because I couldn’t spend a day, much less a series of years, without looking around me for someone to feel things about.

I had been living in a constant bargain with Ciaran for months. Every day that passed in which I was easy to be with, and accommodating, and a good girlfriend, was a ritual offered up. My body expected the perseverance to mean something. And 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.

Being in love feels like nothing so much as hope; a distilled, clear hope which would be impossible to manufacture on your own. One of the saddest things to feel is that nothing in the world is new, that you have exhausted all your interactions with it. When I feel that way I wake each day into the already-dusky afternoon with deep regret that nothing has happened overnight to change me. I wake so late because although I can’t stand to be conscious, I can’t stand to try to sleep either. To lie down in the dark and think, for even a moment, seems an unspeakable prospect, so I drink until I pass out, or stare at the television until my eyes physically can’t stay open any longer. If I try to travel my way out of this feeling, cities blur into one another. I waste money feeling bad in a piazza by myself, twelve-euro bland pasta, too much wine, some dull man always trying to speak with me. When I go home to Waterford to try to even out and reconnect with myself and my past, people seem to be dying all the time all around me, and I argue with my parents about my reluctance to engage with them. I don’t want to hear about the illnesses and tragedies, and am amazed by their ability to keep attending funeral after funeral. It feels as though all I can do each day is eat and sleep and trudge through the hours and start again – and, in fact, it is all I can do. Anti-depressants come and go, making little difference either way to the fact that my reaction to all of life, all of God’s g...

In the car we avoided each other’s eyes and spoke with wobbling voices, and as we arrived back at Mam’s house 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.

I sat staring into space for hours at a time, unable to move beneath the weight. 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.

We should, after all, have our own desires, free of men! Of course we should. I can only imagine; I would love to feel it. 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, with what has happened with men in the past, with what they have said about me and my body, what thoughts they have put in my head without me even knowing.

I was talking to Noah all this time. He was unreal – or what he meant to me was unreal – but he seemed like a miracle, bursting off my screen whenever he contacted me, his cleverness and weird hilarity. I would walk around all day and not look up at all. He took pictures of what he was eating and what he was seeing and told me what he was thinking without me asking him to.

What was good about him was that he wasn’t even the most important part of what made him good. He made the world itself seem good and ripe and ready to be run towards, he made me feel funny and new and fizzing, and like he wouldn’t even need to be there for that to be true.

It wouldn’t be just us in the world because he wasn’t that sort of person, couldn’t be contained even if I wanted to do that to him. I would love him because of his expansiveness, his open heart and greedy appetites. I wouldn’t want to contain him.