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. It was a thing of total pleasure, total beauty.

really was happy when I seemed happy. I am incapable of lying about my feelings, it’s only that the feelings have no coherence, are not continuous from one hour to the next.

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

something outside of yourself.

needs of the present

The excess of these nights was

never depressing as it was happening, it was a part of being young and having no commitments and no stability. You could tell these nights before they had started usually, some air of mischief in the room when we began to drink. We threw back the first drinks, greedily anticipating the coming looseness and...

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. I find my feelings fascinating and human, for once can sympathise with my own actions.

I was in love with him from the beginning, and there wasn’t a thing he or anybody else could do to change it.

My life as a party girl dwindled away. I slept with too many people’s boyfriends, got sick in too many front rooms. I stopped being enjoyably fun and became only frantically fun, and then felt too old for it all anyway.

I was waitressing in a hipster burger restaurant then, skittish from the running around and the bumps of coke we did in the toilets on double shifts.

My mind was working double-time to selectively absorb and reject the various things he was telling me. He was sorry: good. He was opening up about his past: good. He loved her: bad. ‘Yes,’ I said, trying to be mature. ‘It hurt me so much that, since then, I haven’t wanted to be close to anyone. I was exhausted. I don’t want

to be

hurt any more, or hurt anyone else. But I want to try. I don’t want to hurt you,’ he said, and in that moment I remember thinking, clear as a bell, that I could never hurt him. I remember the fierceness in my chest. I promised myself I would make him trust me. I would rebuild what she had taken away from him....

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

I went to the bathroom and stood in front of the sink and wept bitterly, immediately, without thought. I knew it was childish, behaving this way, but it was painful to be reminded so casually that everything I cared about was subject to the whims of others.

It was insane for sexual jealousy to have entered my head even momentarily at such a time, let alone paralyse my entire body, but I was in love and so I was insane, and I can only feel glad I am at least no longer insane in that particular way, no matter what else I have lost alongside it.

They would drink wine and prosecco in Christina’s flat, put on make-up. They would go to the pub at ten and smoke Marlboro Menthols and drink rum and coke or G and Ts or more white wine. They would go around the corner to the Workman’s Club and stay there till closing as long as it wasn’t full of arseholes and as long as nobody’s ex was there with someone new. They would spend lots of money on poorly mixed cocktails.

It was all so ordinary and underwhelming. They were just two idiots in a mess, who kept convincing and then un-convincing one another of things. They weren’t star-crossed, just dithering, dependent people who couldn’t stay away from each other because they hadn’t worked out how to imagine anything different.

‘When I left you it didn’t make me happy. There was no pleasure in my life after I left. It was only that I didn’t know how to take care of you, but I wish I did know. I wish I’d known then, and I wish I knew now.’

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.

think that my easy offering of myself to others is a way to dispute this pain, to fight with myself. Who cared

what anyone did, if I could do this? If I could disregard myself first, then what did it matter if he did too?

Just as when, years ago, Ciaran had left me I had been consumed by the feeling that things would turn out all right if I could only make him answer his phone or look me in the eye. My huge, ridiculous ego – the belief that I could stop and start the world with my presence.