Acts of Desperation

by Megan Nolan

He ignored me, which I could tolerate, in that moment even enjoyed, the better to demonstrate how quiet and good I could be.

Freja and I are adults. We’re older than you. We have a complicated relationship, but it has nothing to do with you and it does not affect you. Understand?’

he radiated was that of a child sweating out a fever. It is still especially easy for me to love him when I think of him this way.

And then, whenever I fall in love, everything is made new, including myself. My body, my brain, the way I see the simplest things. And the best part is it doesn’t even have to be the first time to work. If I fuck it up once, the next time works just as well.

When you fall in love with someone and your life is remade, you know instinctively that you must take great care of this delicate new world the two of you are building.

I wanted to be totally saturated by him, for there to be no room for anything else to leak in.

sex with Ciaran seemed important. It seemed each time to be driving towards a conclusion, and the conclusion would teach us something profound, if we ever arrived to it.

If I didn’t have change on me to get a coffee he would pay for it but would always, always ask for it back. I found this bizarre and uncomfortable.

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.

I felt my stomach against the elastic of my underwear, spilling over it, both me and monstrously not-me. That I wasn’t thin was not the only thing about me, a fact which seemed obvious everywhere else in the world.

I would always look like a misshapen version of my True Self, a hastily sketched approximation of a human being.

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.

People are scared of teenagers having sex but we might think sometimes about the misery of having a teenage body, a teenage girl’s body especially, how tedious and painful and punitive, and remember that sex might be the first time she realises that bodies can be made to feel good.

There is no truce to be made with my body; if I make one, I know it will only be negated by a new enemy

My old scales are there, my old photographs, the skin across my face taut with hunger, my eyes bright and wild with it, very beautiful, nobody could deny.

This particular afternoon I had decided I was going to become skinny and virtuous like the healthy trim little girls in my class who ate rice cakes and whose socks did not strain against their calves in the least.

‘Nothing,’ I said, ‘I’m just going to have chewing gum after school from now on.’ ‘Good girl,’ she said, and I remember feeling a sad, deep worry that she had been hating me all along for the eating I was doing before, that she had been waiting for me to give it up.

Even if my mother had never uttered a word about her body or mine, I think I would still feel this way when I come home, the same claustrophobic fury under that shared roof, the two of us so close together.

I came from her, she made this body-thing I hate and love so much. I resent her for producing it; I’m mortified I have made such poor use of it. How dare you? I want to scream at her, on the one hand; I love you so much! I’m sorry, on the other.

I needed with every part of my body for him to pick up the phone. That was the only thing I could think of; the sound of his voice saying hello.

So far, it was all taking place in my head with no verification from an outside party, and so long as I kept it that way I could suppress it.

I knew that my relationship was strange and uneven and not reciprocal and that speaking about its reality would confuse and upset people who loved me.

That is, I could understand that a truthful account of it, according to actual events, would sound disturbing, but I did not feel disturbed by it. It was only that other people would be incapable of understanding the way in which objective reality did not account for its essential truth.

My depressions were without source or resolution, and so I had no real answer to the question ‘What’s wrong?’ My relationship with Ciaran had the same feeling of inevitability.

How impoverished my internal life had become, the scrabbling for a token of love from somebody who didn’t want to offer it.

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.

It was painful that he loved me so much and wanted things for me I knew I would never have and never deserve. I owed him so much and I would never repay it. I wished I could somehow make him understand this so he could give up on me.

I’d begin the walk up and be filled with lurching dread at the thought of all the steps yet to take, the familiar corners to turn, the nothing, the nobody, waiting for me when I got there.

Stroked my hands, soothing myself, trying not to bite them or hurt myself.

‘I’m not coming in.’ I looked again at his face, it cut into me. ‘I came here to tell you it’s over. I’m leaving now.’ And he really did turn to leave. How did he do it? It was amazing, remarkable to me even through the sickening shock of it; how could a person be the way he was?

A stance of parental irritation, one you might take with a child who won’t stop asking why they can’t have ice cream for dinner.

I searched, trying to push through like there was some telekinesis fuelled by desperation and love I could use to penetrate him.

‘You gave me this, you told me you loved me, a week ago!’ I was screaming now and along with everything else I hated him for making me into this.

‘It’s not your business any more – any of that. It never was your business, in fact.’

I grabbed him, clung to him, jammed my face to his chest, smelled him, gasping. He brushed me off as easily as an insect and blew angry air and spit through his lips,

I wanted to be as fucked up as humanly possible, to obliterate the memory of his disgusted face on my doorstep. I kept seeing his bored and mocking expression. You thought I loved you, it said. Ha!

There was something intoxicating about being insulted that way, the total lack of respect, the lack of acknowledgement that I was there with him. It was the feeling that I could have been anyone, or no one, that I was something to be emptied into or out, the feeling of existing only to receive what he had to give.

He wanted me to grow up, to know what things I wanted and be able to say them out loud.

might be able to truly love me if only I could be a real person, I failed even harder. I panicked

I could not identify a single thing in my life I would not sacrifice in an instant for him, any place I would not go. I could renounce every last person I knew, leave them to their lives which seemed only grey negatives of the real life I would be able to live with Ciaran. I would move with him anywhere on earth and need nothing.

‘I never did really,’ he had told me. ‘I still don’t think of her that way. We had to leave each other, but you never know what’s going to happen later. Life is long.’

The loss of someone you love can make you go mad in the best of circumstances.

‘I need him. I need him,’ I sobbed to her. ‘I can’t do it. I’m not able to do it.’ Meaning to live, to go on living without him.

‘I’m alone, I’m so alone, I’m scared,’ she didn’t pretend that I wasn’t. ‘I know you are,’ she agreed. ‘You are.’

but allowed his advances so long as they had some potential to help cure her. But it all came to nothing and she died in 1931. Tanzler paid for the funeral and constructed a mausoleum.

No peace for her, no dignity, even when finally released from her captor.

To demand ownership of a woman who doesn’t love you,

when she is dead. To take that dead body and make it yours through hideous force, hideous care, hideous attention. It seemed to sum up all the ways in which men could take you without your permission and turn you into som...

When Ciaran left me, I felt a comfort in how unendurable the pain was. If it couldn’t be endured, it would not be. It would end soon, one way or another.

and when I was inclined to cut myself I was overcome by lethargic refusal and never followed through with it.