by Megan Nolan
‘It’s not your business any more – any of that. It never was your business, in fact.’
I was weeping, and said, ‘Just say goodbye to me then, if it’s over. Can’t you behave like a human being? Don’t you owe me that?’
I didn’t mean this, of course. I didn’t want a goodbye, had no interest in a respectful parting. I only thought if I could make him concede, treat me like a person, touch me, the spell would be broken and he would love me again.
‘Fine,’ he said, his eyes still accusing, mocking. ‘Goodbye.’
‘Hug me goodbye,’ I begged. I don’t want to remember saying it.
He rolled his eyes and stepped towards me, patting my back twice, briskly, like a colleague might.
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, swiftly scooping up his bag and opening the door, walking down the road at speed, not looking back to see me doubled over in the doorway.
He was gone. I dragged myself back inside and lay on the bed. He dawdled through the earth, fooling people into thinking he was alive. What had happened? I sat myself up and put my hand on the cool wall trying to stop the dizziness.
For the rest of the day I sat there and wept and muttered to myself the sequence of events that had led to this moment. I leafed through my diary to find the dates and then recited what had taken place, the day we met, the first time we kissed, the arguments, the reconciliations, the dinners. I said them out loud, again and again, start to finish.
5
My friend took his own life some years ago. A string of phone calls went around us all. I was working in a theatre at the time and ignored the call when it came through. A few hours later at a lunch with some colleagues in a pub, I got a text. It was from someone I barely knew, who didn’t know my friend well either. I read it quickly, holding the phone in one hand as the food was being served and I was still half-talking to the others.
… sorry to be the one to… died at home…
I read it twice in quick succession, staring at the screen blankly. Then I put my phone away and ate my lunch. For an hour his death didn’t exist in any meaningful sense. I can’t remember a single conscious thought that passed through my head until we were all leaving and outside my knees gave out from under me and I stumbled against a wall, repeating: ‘I think my friend is dead.’
A few days later, we gathered in his living room to drink and cry and talk about the funeral. We kept recounting events from the past few months, saying, ‘… and that was the last time I saw him,’ to each other, insisting on describing the exact barstool we had seen him on, or gig we’d bought tickets to and why; as if to say to each other: It happened; I was there; did it happen?
January 2013
Dublin
1
When he left me, I went to the same faux-dive bar where we had argued about the poems written for Freja.
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!
A succession of my girlfriends told me how much they had always hated him, how he was not good enough for me. I threw my head back and laughed, agreed. A friend of mine slid his hand on to my ass, pulled me towards him. I was nauseated by his wet whiskey lips slipping against mine. I pushed him away. It wasn’t like that. It wasn’t like that at all this time. I went home.
When I got in I collapsed into the armchair in which we had sometimes fucked. There was a night not long before Christmas when we had come home late after a house party, giddy and aroused. I put on a record and he had barely been able to wait as I did. He pushed me back on the armchair, threw my dress up over my face and put his mouth on the small childish bit of fat I was so afraid of, escaping over the band my underwear.
‘Get down,’ he said.
And I slid out of the chair on to the floor in front of him.
I bit my lip, my underwear around my ankles, feeling him stalking above me. He liked to walk around with me like that – liked to smoke a cigarette and open a beer.
He pulled up a chair and sat behind me, watching me wait for him.
Later, I was filled with ecstatic confusion at how good it felt that he smoked as I went down on him. My entire body filled with incensed heat, making me work harder, be more fuckable, open my eyes wider, mouth wider.
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. When he came his hands flew backwards to grab the chair, his head flung back, eyes at the ceiling. Mine never left him.
I liked when it had been a day or two since he had last showered, this small act of sharing. When he had been cycling he would be covered in a thin film of soot from the traffic and the dirt and oil from his bicycle would rub off on me. I inhaled the warm, damp smell of his hair and put my face against his soft flannel shirt, to where I could smell the stale, sour, but somehow not-bad after-work smell of him.
Once he had finished complaining about whatever had irritated him that day or on his journey home, he would turn to me as though seeing me for the first time. He would still be wearing the ratty fingerless gloves and would put his hands on either side of my face, covering my ears, so I couldn’t hear anything, and nor did I want to.
Once, he had asked me what sex smelled like, as I spent many minutes nudging different parts of him with my nose. ‘It smells like a greenhouse,’ I said, thinking of how it felt when we had finished and were lying beneath the blanket and the smell travelled up and was close and dense in that way, and gave the same feeling of infinite capacity.
2
Every moment of my day was saturated by his absence, each second made damp and collapsing and airless beneath it. I sat staring into space for hours at a time, unable to move beneath the weight. I enjoyed my pain because it made me less than ever. I was nothing but living nerves, a petri dish of matter. I had no characteristics outside of it.
Ciaran had hated that I was indecisive. He had hated when he would ask where I wanted to go to dinner and I would shrug and say I didn’t mind and he should just choose. He hated when I wanted him to tell me what outfit looked best. He wanted me to grow up, to know what things I wanted and be able to say them out loud. He wanted me to not be the negative space which would fit in around his positive presence, and because I knew this, knew he might be able to truly love me if only I could be a real person, I failed even harder. I panicked and beamed great big bland incurious smiles beneath the frightening totality of his demanding gaze. I smiled and smiled until I cried, but still could not produce a single decision or statement to please him, to be convincingly myself.
And now he had left me and I was even less than that again – so much less. Now there was no thought that did not have to do with him and I did not want anything that wasn’t him. I squeezed my eyes shut and thought of the things I would give for him to return. 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 spent my time searching for everything I could find of him online. I made a folder where I deposited the most important items. All photographs of him made me cry, to come across one I hadn’t seen before was so sad and beautiful that it made life seem almost good again. That there were angles of him I’d never seen, ways he was in the world I hadn’t been around long enough to witness. It was so lovely and painful that I found it impossible to believe I wouldn’t see them myself some day.
(‘Whe
n did you know that you and Freja would break up?’ I had asked him once in our few discussions about her.
‘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.’
Life is long. I refracted his words and bent them back to mean something good for me. You never knew.)
The best things I found were pictures of us together which I had never known existed. I was searching his friends’ pages for news of him and came across a photoset from a launch in Project Arts Centre in Temple Bar. In one photo I’m wearing a thin grey T-shirt with a scoop neck and am pretty and flushed as I look up at him and laugh at something he says, his beautiful face cracked wide with glee. His hand is on my shoulder and I thrilled to see it there in public record, normally so strange about being physical in front of others.
There’s something about a beautiful boy’s face – not handsome, or attractive, or cute, but beautiful. Why are they so moving, when I see so many beautiful girls every day? It isn’t fair, I know. A boy who is beautiful seems to have pushed through the mud and cement of his gender. His beautiful face seems carved out of the rawest materials.
There was something about such a face, in any case, which made me believe intuitively that the boy was good. If not on the surface, then in some other place you may have to dig down to find. I, who would have laughed at such a sentiment about a beautiful girl, who knew how fleeting and unreliable and meaningless our beauty was – I, still, was taken in by the beautiful faces of boys.
I looked for him online every day and murmured with feeling when I saw him in some particularly revealing pose; gnawing on his fingernails in the corner of a reading, looking flushed and uncomfortable at an opening speech during Dublin City Culture Night. I went back years and harvested what I could. I was friends with enough friends of his to have a good sense of where he would be most weeks, which openings he would go to and screenings he might attend. I didn’t go to them, aware I would probably see her there.
Once I walked into a pub to meet a friend after work and thought I saw the top of his downy head peeking out of a snug in the corner. I swung around and messaged my friend to go somewhere else and ran down an alley that smelled of piss and had to press my temples with my knuckles until the pain blacked everything else out and my heart drifted back to normal speed.
3
The loss of someone you love can make you go mad in the best of circumstances. I did not just love Ciaran but loved him darkly, wrongly. Losing someone you love in those ways can turn you not only mad but wicked too.
When he left me, I dreamed of the two of them sometimes, woke up sweating.
I thought of going to his house and hammering on the window until they let me in. I dreamed that March of killing her and woke oddly calm, thinking repetitively: Well, stranger things have happened; well, stranger things have happened.
I had slipped into his room as they slept and stood looking at them from the doorway. Moonlight was on their faces and made them look beautiful and already dead. I wrapped her beautiful dark hair around my fist and cracked her skull against the wall – one, two – and because it was a dream I was strong enough to move her entire body in a violent wave with one hand.
Her mouth was opening and dribbling and bubbling and there was a black stain on the headboard behind, and her long thin arm was twitching and grasping uselessly until it wasn’t.
Beside her, Ciaran watched calmly, his eyes raising to meet mine once she had stopped breathing, and then turned back towards the wall in the same position he always slept, dragging the blanket tight around him.
4
At night sometimes I called Lisa, the only person I could say the truth to, the truth that was so basic and so large.
‘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.
And I loved her for not bothering to contradict me or to tell me that I didn’t need anybody, that I would get over it. She knew intuitively, knew always, that she herself did not need anybody to live, but this difference between the two of us didn’t make my experience any less real than her own. She had seen how actual the need was with her own eyes.
When once I gasped, ‘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.’
5
I looked for other people who had felt like me, hoping for comfort or clues. My search terms were things like ‘Obsessive love’, ‘Famous cases of unrequited love’, ‘Incidents of obsession’. I read about a story I had heard first on a podcast years before, about a man named Carl Tanzler, a medical professional – though not a doctor – in Florida who had fallen in love with his patient, a Cuban– American woman named Maria Elena Milagro de Hoyos in the 1920s. She had suffered from tuberculosis, which had also killed one of her sisters. Tanzler was instantly obsessed with her, offering her his dubious medical expertise and radiology equipment, going to her family home to administer additional treatments. He showered her with gifts and jewellery and declared her the love of his life, the realisation of a series of visions he had seen of a mysterious dark-haired angel.
She offered no reciprocation. Her family undoubtedly must have found him an oppressive and disturbing presence, 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.
In 1933 he visited the site of her burial at night and used a cart to remove her decomposing corpse, putting it in his car and taking it home. There he used pins and wires and ham-fisted cage-like constructions to keep her disintegrating bones together, and wrapped them with gauze and muslins heavily coated in fragrance to try to drown out the persistent stink of her decay. He made a mask, blank and smooth, supposed to replicate her real features but naturally terrible in its inadequacy. Neighbours saw him through his windows dancing with the figure of a woman.
He was brought to trial but never sentenced, and Maria Elena’s body – such as it was, still dolled up with his horrifying artifice and inadequate mummification – was put on show in a funeral home where thousands of curious members of the public would go to view the spectacle. No peace for her, no dignity, even when finally released from her captor.
The first time I heard the story I felt angry. To demand ownership of a woman who doesn’t love you, even 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 something you had never been, which had nothing to do with you.
Now, as I read it again, through my bewildered grief, I wondered if I was any better than him. I wondered if I ever had been. Perhaps I had just never loved someone madly until now. Perhaps I had always been as violent as a man. Wouldn’t I do anything to reverse my loss, the absence of him? Wouldn’t I sacrifice not just myself but himself to get it? Wouldn’t I make him everything he wasn’t, make him soft and tender and domesticated and weak, so long as it meant I could convince him to be mine again?
I read a case study of a woman, Patient M, who suffered from erotomania, or De Clerambault syndrome, in upstate New York in the 1970s. The woman was the child of first-generation Chinese immigrant parents, and a diligent student at a Christian college. She had a strict but normal upbringing, supportive parents, friends, a handful of supervised dates with boys who were her cultural peers. In her sophomore year of college, she began to take tutorials from a Caucasian man – Professor X – in his early forties. The man was a professor of theology, and married with two children, all involved in the local church and community of which Patient M was also a part.
Patient M began sending letters of a personal nature to Professor X, telling him about her difficulties with her schooling, her family and o
ther relationships. At first he replied, trying to offer her comfort and spiritual guidance, but quickly her correspondence increased up to ten letters a day, and he began to be alarmed by their overly familiar tone and strange references to affection and a shared bond he had no part in.
Though her family, her college authorities and eventually the police would warn her to leave Professor X alone, Patient M continued and in fact increased her campaign, perceiving their attempts to be proof of her theory that the professor’s wife was determined to keep them apart. She began to stalk him at his office and his home, until she was expelled permanently. Her letters continued to show that she believed Professor X loved her and was kept from her only by the constraints of their Christian culture.
One July morning, professional acquaintances and friends of the professor were shocked to receive wedding invitations to the marriage of him and Patient M. The more distant of them presumed that he had been divorced and was planning a shotgun wedding to his rebound lover, before he got hold of them and explained the strange situation. It was at this point that Patient M was taken into institutional custody, after which her fate is unknown. Several weeks after her detainment as a mental patient, her parents received a phone call from a local Chinese restaurant, wondering where the wedding party was, for she had booked a sit-down meal for thirty to celebrate the union.
6
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.
I went on living, going to work mostly (two days had been lost to the magnificent hangover which followed the night it had happened). Somehow my body knew instinctively to preserve itself for its future work. I ate well and minimally, and when I was inclined to cut myself I was overcome by lethargic refusal and never followed through with it. I was usually too tired to go out and drink, and too ashamed to do it alone. I had the feeling that by some obscure set of living rules I could graft my way out of the pain.