Acts of Desperation

by Megan Nolan

When the pain reached its pitch I would bang my head behind me twice in quick succession, hard enough to manufacture the feeling that my brain was being physically dislodged and to scare and then calm me.

Was I feeling something true from within myself, or was I living out a fantasy I had assembled?

When I was fifteen years old I stopped eating and I became popular.

I planned my outfit for weeks, something that showed off my skeletal frame but also made me look Quirky, meaning only that there was a tutu on my dress.

My great-grandmother died in a nursing home.

The place was as repulsive and frightening as you can imagine for a child, smelling of disinfectant or worse, and I always left feeling like I had gone there to be good, to do something good, but had failed to achieve that.

I held the phone to my breast and cradled it there like an infant. I clung to the heat of suggestion, I throbbed. A blissful patience swam through me, the certainty that I could wait for ever.

I had been right to wait, to be careful, to stay inside.

There was so much inside me that I wanted to give to him.

‘I thought we could sort of start again,’ he said, and then kissed me. I had won. And how did I win? Oh, in its way, it was easy – it was nothing; I was nothing. Two weeks later, we moved in together.

I knew what this meant and spun briskly away from the objects as though burned by them.

I never knew if he referred to Freja as ‘a friend’ in this way because he thought I was too dense to understand who he meant, or whether it came from a reluctance to say her name aloud, as if by doing so he would give her a way into our home.

For me, food was messier, more complex. It was stressful, yes, but could be joyful too, something to binge on, and then shy away from; something to wrestle with, and offer up, and bury.

When, as a pious starving teenager, I learned to cook, it was an almost holy process. Until then I could only deny or destroy what was given to me by others – the balled-up sandwiches at the bottom of schoolbags, missed breakfasts, puked-up spaghetti, chicken thighs mummified in toilet paper and hidden in my bedroom drawers until the stench escaped.

I chose what I cooked and because I chose it and knew it intimately, I was able to eat it.

Something had broken in me when, as an adult, I had allowed myself to eat normally again and to gain weight.

The betrayal of my thin self was too painful to confront fully,

and so I refused to look food directly in ...

I had to stop believing that the act of eating food could do anything at all to my body, because if I didn’t then I would never have been able to eat again.

Living with him forced me to treat myself like a person in a way I was not able to alone.

When we had sex he forgave me, even when he didn’t want to.

I didn’t feel like suffering the further humiliation of trying to convince them he wasn’t what they thought.

At first I was inclined to soothe, to mitigate, because of how pointless it was to rail against them.

But then I saw that siding with him was the safer thing to do.

If I agreed with his outrage, and complained about the same things he did, we were by default teammates. He would begin to see me as not of the world that so angered him, but of his own world, th...

I wanted, I suppose, for him to need me, without knowing that it was me that he needed at all.

if I thought that my subservience could be ironised and eroticised out of reality – oh, I feel sorry for myself.

you just stay there and I’ll take care of it. Meaning: you just stay there. I’ll take care of you.

I was taking away his ability to live without me easily. I subbed his rent, I cooked his food, I cleaned his clothes, so that one day soon there would come a time when he could no longer remember how he had ever done without me, and could not imagine doing so ever again.

on weekends and the weak sun caused us to wear less, I began to see them through his eyes.

I would notice her first, and my eyes would dart to his to see him clock her.

He referred once to his losing his virginity, fifteen years prior, to a beautiful girl named Jessica. For weeks after, I boiled. Jessica. Jessica. I wondered if I could find her through this forename alone, to stare at her, compare, rank.

I was trying to build a registry of every threat in our vicinity, the better to prepare myself against them.

I felt within me something I had not in many years, which was the desire to punish someone by not eating.

This was a regular inclination when I was young, an ineffectual but unignorable urge in the direction of someone who had wronged me.

It was never intended as a rational response; I knew, of course, that they would never know that I was not eating, and even if they did, they would not know it was they who had caused it.

That the pain was private made it better – I made them torture me, without their consent.

but now I was with Ciaran at nearly all times outside of work, and my Friday nights alone gave me space to look at Freja and to drink.

Were we as well matched as they had been? Did we look as good? Did he appear to be in love with her, in a way he did not with me?

How jealously I regarded her beauty, her cleanliness and smell of fresh clothes and the way that boys loved her and the way she was appropriately removed from them. I was always down in the dirt.

I envy women who are removed. I never really had that luxury.

It was as though he had vacuumed up all the available negativity in the apartment and I was afraid to let any seep out of me, lest it disrupt the balance.

When he looked at his phone my heart went faster, I felt the blood moving through my terrible weak body, was completely unable to think of anything else. My eyes stayed fixed at a blank spot on the top of my page and then slowly leaked over into his space and I tried to peer sideways so hard my temples throbbed, to see if it was her he was speaking to.

Then we went to bed, where I wished we could be always, where he felt finally and truly mine, the friendliness of a body’s smell and softness overpowering all the sour rest of him.

‘Can you shut the fuck up please?’ I squeezed my eyes shut as they jeered at him, repeating what he had said, exaggerating his accent and laughing uncontrollably.

be some thing that we were doing together that might bring us back to his good mood,

‘Are you OK?’ I asked again.

‘I’m fucking fine! Jesus!’

‘I’m not upset with you.’ He kept his eyes on the book. ‘I’m not anything with you.’

We live together, I’m here all the time, I can’t talk for all of it just to keep you amused. Christ, it’s like living with a toddler sometimes.’