Acts of Desperation

by Megan Nolan

The excess of these nights was never depressing as it was happening, it was a part of being young and having no commitments and no stability. You could tell these nights before they had started usually, some air of mischief in the room when we began to drink. We threw back the first drinks, greedily anticipating the coming looseness and hysteria.

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

It was sort of amazing seeing men who weren’t particularly attractive but who believed, more or less correctly, that they could have and do whatever they wanted.

She was wide eyed and gregarious and rarely alone. There seemed to be no part of her that wished for anonymity or the privacy of solitude. I admired this in her, the ease of it and the goodness, knowing as I did the different texture of my own solicitation of company, which was conditional and explosive when not satisfied.

I didn’t understand that some people didn’t have that want inside them.

Mediating your own victimhood is just part of being a woman. Using it or denying it, hating it or loving it, and all of these at once.

It would be easier if I could paint a line down the middle of the house, and have rape on one side and sex on the other. I have had sex without wanting to many times in my life. It was only once that I protested and was overpowered.

The inherent tenderness of the person (me) who is raped, their assumed softness, pliancy disgusts me – the femaleness of that disgusts me.

And so in moments like this one when I was unexpectedly confronted by my own need, my reaction was to deny – to hysterically deny – that it existed.

I didn’t ask love of him. I didn’t want him to look in my direction and see me; for there was no thing I could say, with confidence, was me. I panicked when my need shone through because it was real.

I’ve always seen my body as nothing so much as deeply disturbing in its constant variance, a fluctuating, unmanageable thing that has basically nothing to do with me, is not really any of my business at all.

When I go back home I am angrier than ever. I am all at once submerged in every body I ever was, all the failed attempts at being a certain kind of person.

Every moment of my day was saturated by his absence, each second made damp and collapsing and airless beneath it. 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.

It’s a peculiar anger, resenting doing something that nobody asked you to do. And it’s a peculiarly impotent sort of anger that domestic labour brings about. It was building up in me, a feeling like the blood of my body slowly becoming dirty as it coursed through.

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.

I made mistakes like that all the time, seeking affirmation from the very worst people, so that what I must have been after deep down was confirmation of the fears instead of their dismissals.

And most of all, the feeling of walking around a foreign city: off an airbus in a short dress and sunglasses, 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.

Those moments have been the rawest, most tender flaying of myself, a return to the simplicity of what I know to be more or less the point of life, of coming together with another person without care for what the next day will bring, unexpected connection without fear.

I had loved my father so fiercely for my entire life. Through all the squalid mess of my teenage years and beyond, during the very worst things, we had always stayed close, I had always needed him.

I was gripped by a sudden awareness of how terribly alone I was. My father was one of the few anchors I had to myself. When I didn’t know who I was at a given moment I could think of him and count the years back to the start. When I didn’t know who I was I could at least think of him and say, I am his. Without him, would I be forced to be this new person, this Ciaran’s-person for the rest of my life? What would hold me down any more, what would make me real? I felt that I would simply float away, that there would be nothing left of the thing I called Me before Ciaran.

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

My dad was always able to save me from anything, no matter how reckless or inexplicable, he was always able to save me from anything but myself.

Nobody who loves me from now on will ever know, really know, really believe, that I was a beautiful child once.

These stories hurt me so badly, but I’ve learned to react to that hurt by thinking of them again and again, forcing myself to replay the details over and over and over, until they are meaningless. You grow cold, or you die yourself.

Life was so pointless, so opaque and shifting, that I could only think about immediate feelings. Immediacy was all I had.

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

I thought then that that was all those times were: relief. They were always relief from the absence of what I feared, the ordinary, truly daily things: the coldness, and the ignorance, and the disdain, and the hatred.

The pleasure wasn’t often pleasure; it was release from pain. It was binding yourself and feeling good when the bandages came off, it was cutting a hole in your leg so you could feel it heal.

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.

That night Mark kissed me and I let him. It was the easy thing to do, the only thing to do. The idea of telling him not to and the ensuing conversation filled me with weariness. I wondered how many times in my life I had made this calculation, how the men would feel if they knew, if they would care.

It’s not that my body means any more to me now than it once did, it’s only that I hate you more. I resent the fact that you can take pleasure from me.