Acts of Desperation

by Megan Nolan

Is it possible to love someone without knowing them, by sight? How can I describe what happened to me without the word love?

I couldn’t stop laughing in amazement, thinking of how he kissed me, thinking that there was nobody else I wanted to kiss now.

I clung to his reassuringly solid, soft stomach

Then we would sit on his couch hugging and touching each other slowly, speaking quietly about our days.

We touched each other with such care and delicacy, as though afraid to break the new thing we were to one another.

This is part of the horror of being hurt generically. Your experiences are so common that they become impossible to speak about in an interesting way. If I want to say something about my hurt, I hear my voice enter the canon of Women Who’ve Been Hurt, becoming unknown, not-mine.

I feel no common understanding grow between myself and other women who have been hurt in the same ways that I have, no thread of sisterhood connecting our experiences.

facing in towards each other, hands on the other’s legs, or idling at the neck, or brushing the lips, always touching somewhere.

Every day that passed in which I was easy to be with, and accommodating, and a good girlfriend, was a ritual offered up.

He was nice to the waiter and ordered for us both in a way that made me feel small and contained and happy.

I slept for twelve hours straight, as I often did when I first came home, as though recovering from having to be alive on my own all year round.

That day and the next I sat in our living room and read fat silly novels of the sort I didn’t allow myself normally, helped to wrap presents, cooked. I drank wine with my mother and gossiped about people we knew and watched bad television.

I could smell the stale, sour, but somehow not-bad after-work smell of him.

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.

There’s something about a beautiful boy’s face – not handsome, or attractive, or cute, but beautiful.

Making a good meal at the end of a bad day can redeem the whole thing. No matter what else has taken place, if you have the time to do this one thing for yourself, it all falls away.

I smoked endlessly when drunk, it was true, but wasn’t bothered with cigarettes in between. They were the same as drinking to me, a kind of full stop to thinking and daily life, an end-of-the-day excess.

I cut down on food so I would feel light and powerful.

I could not bear to watch a film with Ciaran sometimes – wasn’t able to relax for the two hours in which he was seeing a person who was better to look at than me. I clawed my thighs slowly and deeply beneath the duvet.

I love the sex of knowing someone very well for years and just what will make them crumble and break open, but I also love to have sex with new people for not much more than their newness. I wish, when I leave them, that I could stay and sleep with them a hundred more times until I’ve exhausted all their strangeness, but I know too that the fact I can’t is what makes the meeting so sacred.

I can’t confirm his suspicions that everyone – but especially women – that everyone is essentially bad.

Strange to know you’ll never again be with the kind of person who made you love first, their imprint inescapable.

We woke the next morning, his breath was sweet and milky, even first thing, like a kid’s. We grinned at one another sheepishly and kissed and stretched about yawning in bed,

wanted someone whose affection and attention was straightforward. I wanted something easy to understand,

I wanted to be the one who could shatter his outside and get to the good parts, wanted to be the saint who made him see it wasn’t all women who were sluts and liars;

My hair was a long matted mass from being tossed around with such casual abandon and I tore it into manageable segments, to soap it through and make it normal again.

A few times a year I would go on my lunch break to give blood, just because I liked how careful they had to be with you, and that they’d touch you with such practised ease.

I thought of his sleepy eyes fondly regarding me, like I was a thing of value he coveted and knew that he deserved, his lazy smile and the irreducible him-ness of him.

I hate my weakness, what I severed of myself and gave to him, but love it too, love it still. I do not take it back. I love the girl who did those things. I love the girl because I feel sorry for her, and understand her.

my body looked different to me after somebody had fucked it, more coherent than before.

was happy, as I always am in the sea, the only place I have ever found where my body feels natural and mine and being used according to its intent. I am weightless but not insubstantial. I am always sure of what my body should be doing there. I feel seal-like, the fat I normally hate becomes sleek and normal in water, my inelegant body can be strong there.

I swam as far out as I could without stopping to breathe, and then came up, far from shore, so far I could not see the expression on anyone’s face, so far that I could not be kept track of.