Read Online Your Voice in My Head by Emma Forrest - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Emma Forrest
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moisturizer was probably vegan.”
“OK,” I say. “OK, you win. Optimist.”
Time’s up.
CHAPTER 11
DR. R AND I keep plowing from the last session. I tell him about my first love, a man for whom I was most emphatically not his first love or, indeed, his love at all. It was a few months after San Francisco. He was in a rock band. I was a teenage music journalist. He sent me postcards, sometimes, not often, from tour. He sent me a couple of books.
Memoirs of a Revolutionary
by Victor Serge arrived, inscribed with elaborate indifference.
When I gave in to him he sighed and said, “We’re similar, Em. We’ll always be the least attractive people in the room.” A sort of postcoital contempt. After we’d make love, he’d tell me the reasons I wasn’t pretty and how he was special for wanting me. That’s when the cutting kicked off.
“I used to cut myself when I knew I was going to run into him, so I couldn’t take my clothes off. So I wouldn’t lose my heart to him. Though, of course, I already had.”
Dr. R looks very, very sad. “Did that work?”
“No. I wanted him so much, I’d go home with him anyway. And he didn’t see the cuts. He never noticed. If he did he didn’t say anything. He just fucked me anyway.” I start to cry, amazed that the man who I thought had vanished ten years earlier, like Brigadoon, can still have this effect. I don’t like saying “fuck” in front of Dr. R. I hate it. I feel like I sully this room.
Though, really, what am I sullying? I don’t know what stories came before or which will be here with the patient after me. Suddenly I want to cover my mouth, afraid of breathing psychological germs, and get out of there, leaving my lovelorn teenage self in London, on her knees, before a man who cannot stand her.
CHAPTER 12
MAY 10, 2008
I met Dr. R at a particularly hard time in my life. It was by chance that I was referred to him on my birthday nine years ago
.
When I called to make the appointment he said he had a cancellation. He said how about January 19. I said it was not good, it was my forty-ninth birthday; who goes to the doctor on their birthday, and he responded, “Why not, it’s as good a day as ever.” He was wise that way
.
In retrospect, I now think of my first visit with Dr. R as the best birthday present I have ever been given
.
I did not know that Dr. R was ill. I saw him several months ago. He was his usual upbeat, caring, focused, insightful self. He never lost a step in his stride. I realize now how brave he was that day. I will—forever—remember him as my hero
.
M ( NEW YORK, NY )
“I know you’re getting better because of how you coped with nine-eleven. Other patients didn’t do so well.”
I shrug. “Mental people don’t like apocalypse.”
He looks me dead on. “Many of my patients were triggered by it. Not you.”
As the day had unfolded, even my toughest friends had become hysterical. They said there were still planes in the sky. They said we were about to have bombs dropped from above. We all gathered at SB’s, and I persuaded the group that we had to go to the hospital and give blood. So that’s where we went. But there was no one to give blood to because nobody was alive.
“I realize,” I tell Dr. R, “that I’m really, really bad at navigating life’s pointless daily pain. And that I’m better at handling catastrophe.”
Living so close to St. Vincent’s hospital, I follow the outsider art that springs up on the walls of the building in the form of “Missing” posters. You see the families who could afford to laminate them, with five different phone numbers and contacts. And the barely legible ones that look like they were copied at the deli. When the rains wash away the badly printed ones in Spanish, I do sit down on the sidewalk and weep. I sit with them every day because there is nothing I can do but say “I’m sorry” and “See, you were loved. So much.” In life, there would have been times, maybe
“OK,” I say. “OK, you win. Optimist.”
Time’s up.
CHAPTER 11
DR. R AND I keep plowing from the last session. I tell him about my first love, a man for whom I was most emphatically not his first love or, indeed, his love at all. It was a few months after San Francisco. He was in a rock band. I was a teenage music journalist. He sent me postcards, sometimes, not often, from tour. He sent me a couple of books.
Memoirs of a Revolutionary
by Victor Serge arrived, inscribed with elaborate indifference.
When I gave in to him he sighed and said, “We’re similar, Em. We’ll always be the least attractive people in the room.” A sort of postcoital contempt. After we’d make love, he’d tell me the reasons I wasn’t pretty and how he was special for wanting me. That’s when the cutting kicked off.
“I used to cut myself when I knew I was going to run into him, so I couldn’t take my clothes off. So I wouldn’t lose my heart to him. Though, of course, I already had.”
Dr. R looks very, very sad. “Did that work?”
“No. I wanted him so much, I’d go home with him anyway. And he didn’t see the cuts. He never noticed. If he did he didn’t say anything. He just fucked me anyway.” I start to cry, amazed that the man who I thought had vanished ten years earlier, like Brigadoon, can still have this effect. I don’t like saying “fuck” in front of Dr. R. I hate it. I feel like I sully this room.
Though, really, what am I sullying? I don’t know what stories came before or which will be here with the patient after me. Suddenly I want to cover my mouth, afraid of breathing psychological germs, and get out of there, leaving my lovelorn teenage self in London, on her knees, before a man who cannot stand her.
CHAPTER 12
MAY 10, 2008
I met Dr. R at a particularly hard time in my life. It was by chance that I was referred to him on my birthday nine years ago
.
When I called to make the appointment he said he had a cancellation. He said how about January 19. I said it was not good, it was my forty-ninth birthday; who goes to the doctor on their birthday, and he responded, “Why not, it’s as good a day as ever.” He was wise that way
.
In retrospect, I now think of my first visit with Dr. R as the best birthday present I have ever been given
.
I did not know that Dr. R was ill. I saw him several months ago. He was his usual upbeat, caring, focused, insightful self. He never lost a step in his stride. I realize now how brave he was that day. I will—forever—remember him as my hero
.
M ( NEW YORK, NY )
“I know you’re getting better because of how you coped with nine-eleven. Other patients didn’t do so well.”
I shrug. “Mental people don’t like apocalypse.”
He looks me dead on. “Many of my patients were triggered by it. Not you.”
As the day had unfolded, even my toughest friends had become hysterical. They said there were still planes in the sky. They said we were about to have bombs dropped from above. We all gathered at SB’s, and I persuaded the group that we had to go to the hospital and give blood. So that’s where we went. But there was no one to give blood to because nobody was alive.
“I realize,” I tell Dr. R, “that I’m really, really bad at navigating life’s pointless daily pain. And that I’m better at handling catastrophe.”
Living so close to St. Vincent’s hospital, I follow the outsider art that springs up on the walls of the building in the form of “Missing” posters. You see the families who could afford to laminate them, with five different phone numbers and contacts. And the barely legible ones that look like they were copied at the deli. When the rains wash away the badly printed ones in Spanish, I do sit down on the sidewalk and weep. I sit with them every day because there is nothing I can do but say “I’m sorry” and “See, you were loved. So much.” In life, there would have been times, maybe
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