Acts of Desperation

by Megan Nolan

Ciaran was not the first beautiful man I slept with, or the first man I had obsessive feelings for, but he was the first man I worshipped. His body would become a site of prayer for me, a place where I could forget about my own living flesh and be only with his.

What must it feel like to be beautiful but also invisible whenever you choose to be? To be a beautiful man?

They were drawings and notes from old lovers and friends, postcards, photographs, porcelain figures, antique ashtrays. I needed these things, fixed them as soon as I arrived somewhere new, but now I was alone they seemed foolish. They looked like props for a bad theatre production, trying to summon up a personality where there was none.

Why do you do it? Because I like to. Meaning, not so much that I take pleasure in it, but: I choose it.

But before Ciaran I still contemplated suffering as something with meaning. I understood even the most inexplicable of tragedies as being imbued with some as yet unknown purpose.

(What could people be expected to tolerate of me? How much of what I needed could I reasonably demand?) (Nothing, nothing, nothing.)

I didn’t ask love of him. I didn’t want him to look in my direction and see me; for there was no thing I could say, with confidence, was me. I panicked when my need shone through because it was real.

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 in time. What is the point?

‘What do you want to eat?’ my mother asked. ‘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.

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?

He dawdled through the earth, fooling people into thinking he was alive.

Perhaps I had just never loved someone madly until now. Perhaps I had always been as violent as a man.

I had won. And how did I win? Oh, in its way, it was easy – it was nothing; I was nothing.

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.

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

He looked like an illustration of superiority, like propaganda for the idea of a man.

I made mistakes like that all the time, seeking affirmation from the very worst people, so that what I must have been after deep down was confirmation of the fears instead of their dismissals.

I wondered how they always knew that I was someone to be hurt. Even when I didn’t tell them to, they knew somehow that there was a part of me that accepted or desired it.

The chiding and the shaping of me, the backhanded compliments and barbed advice. The constant knowledge that I would never, ever be what he wanted. The pleasure wasn’t often pleasure; it was release from pain.

‘Stop crying, you bitch,’ he said, and I looked up at him then, through my tears, and I saw that he hated me. He hated me entirely and completely.

I hate now for men to dote in this way, the ones who don’t know me. Their praise lands uncertainly in the air somewhere between the two of us, because it doesn’t belong to me.

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?