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?

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.

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.

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.

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

There is no better feeling to me than to wake up in the middle of the night and thrust my hand out and say, half in a dream still, ‘I love you so much,’ and for a person to turn towards me from muscle memory and say through their own sleep, ‘I love you too.’ There’s never been a drug or a friend or a food that’s even come close.

It’s a peculiar anger, resenting doing something that nobody asked you to do.

How lucky I have been that so much of my pain is from fearing the loss of what I already have, instead of suffering the absence entirely, as Ciaran did.

Is it brave to be alone? Maybe, in a way. But it was also brave to ask someone to be with me, even though it was the wrong person, and in the wrong way. How could I have asked him to love me, day after day, when the answer kept on being no? What desperation made me live that way?