Acts of Desperation

by Megan Nolan

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.

Being in love was like that to me, a shield, a higher purpose, a

promise to something outside of yourself.

communal edge of mania; on these nights I would spend a huge amount of money I did not have, because – even more so than usual – time beyond the present seemed absolutely unreal, and the needs of the present were urgent.

There were things we had expected to have by now that we did not have.

‘Bennett,’ he said, ‘it was my vacation, after all.’

Why do you do it? Because I like to.

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

Female suffering is cheap and is used cheaply by dishonest women who are looking only for attention – and of all our cardinal sins, seeking attention must surely be up there.

My understanding was that every action would lead me to where I ought to be ultimately, and where I ought to be was in love.

I love myself in love.

girls who were tall and willowy and part-time modelling while they studied fine art. I think that I wanted more than anything to be real like those girls, but I didn’t know how to

be,

but the value I held was not the kind I wanted to hold, and I did not know how to exchange it.

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.

Being young and beautiful felt like a lot sometimes, felt like it translated to real-world power, but money shat all over it every time.

‘I’ve wanted this for a long time,’ he said. ‘Since I first saw you.’ ‘Me too,’ I said back, but I knew that I didn’t mean it.

I had wanted never to sleep with him, had wanted us to keep talking, to

wake up to his messages, to be amused by one another. I wanted our chaste coffee dates to go on and on, for there to be no end to these things,...

It felt good in a way, because he was so excited and I was pleased to make him so, but I was filled with sadness...

I had never felt so unlike a human being, so disposable and flimsy and built purely for function.

He called me a cab to go home and I knew I would never hear from him again and I never did.

which was conditional and explosive when not satisfied.

I thought a life that looked that way – clean and gentle and high-minded – would get me what I truly wanted, which was to do with having as much of people as possible, their attention, their desire, their curiosity.

You earned the eventual love story with your restraint.

They were in love and there was nothing torturous or humiliating about it.

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.

She alone could see the reservoirs of need that existed in me and would never stop spilling out, ruining all they touched, and she didn’t hate me for them, but felt sorry for me.

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

looking back over his shoulder as though wanting to start an argument with them. I would try to steer him on as gently as I could, sympathising and agreeing.

‘What are you doing?’ he said, shaking me off. ‘Why are you being so rude?’ I hated myself for being near tears, but I was. I had been looking forward to going there with him, introducing him to people, being seen with my beautiful, interesting boyfriend. ‘That reading was shit.’

He clocked the tears and caught my eye, jutting his jaw and pursing his mouth in an exaggerated gesture of disgust that I would come to know very well and hate completely.

It was the first time he had been cold in this way to me, although I had glimpsed his coldness before.

You can have a seat at the big boys’ table for being such a good sport. So, go ahead: ha ha ha.

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. 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 in soap operas and tabloids. Is this why I am so ashamed of talking about certain events, or of finding them interesting? 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.

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 looked at myself, lumpen and inelegant and abused, and thought: So what?

will. I know it is unfashionable to describe rape as sex (the implication being that rape is a violent, rather than a sexual act; can’t it be both? And sometimes more one than the other?) but it felt very much like sex to me. From a purely physical point of view it didn’t even feel very different to some of the worse consensual sex I had had, those times where I had realised immediately that I would rather not continue, but did so to be polite, feigning enjoyment to make it end quicker.

I have had sex without wanting to many times in my life. It was only once that I protested and was overpowered.

How much of what I needed could I reasonably demand?)

‘You sent them to her? You sent Freja poems you wrote for her?’ ‘To get her opinion, yes. And I thought she’d like to

see them. We’re just friends, you know.’

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.

If I stand here all night; thinking maybe if I stroked the awful, dead-thing stomach one thousand times exactly, thinking, Please, please, God, send him back to me, give him back to me, I won’t stop asking.

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.

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.

He shook me off so violently that I stumbled backwards, and then I was crying and saying please over and over again.

It never succeeded in eliciting any good or compassionate feeling, and yet I kept doing it. I never wanted to. It seemed as impossible to restrain as vomit, and its ability to repel him only made me do it harder.

Some part of me had already decided to live for him and let him take over the great weight of myself.

I pleaded with him to see how small I really was.

was happy to be nothing if nothing was what pleased him best.