Your Voice in My Head by Emma Forrest Read Free Book Online Page A

I was when I had the good fortune to have landed under his care
.
    This loss is too large to describe
.
    ANNA ( NEW YORK, NY )

CHAPTER 7
    THERE’S A SET OF PHOTOS of me in my bra and panties and knee-high socks, bleeding all over the place. They were taken by an unnamed photographer, a fashion god, the week before the suicide attempt.
    “Maybe I should hang on to these,” says Dr. R when I show him.
    “No.”
    I stretch out my hand. I walk over to him, hover above his seat.
    “I look fat.”
    He doesn’t sigh or gasp. He makes some notes.
    “You know you’re not fat.”
    “I know that. I said that I
look
fat.”
    I take them from his hand, put them away, and snap: “What’s the point of being one way, if you appear, in posterity, to be another?”
    “Whether or not you look bigger than you are in a photois not what defines you. It would define some women. Shallow, disturbed women. Not you.”
    No matter how many times I stood before him saying, “I am shallow. I am disturbed,” he’d never repeat it back to me. In a romantic relationship, you can make the person say that. I always got my boyfriends to say it back to me.
    If you piss behind a lamppost when you’re twenty, that’s carefree and eccentric and bold. If you piss behind a lamppost when you’re thirty-eight, that’s just disgusting. Isn’t it? If you’re a man making eyes at girls at twenty, that’s raffish. If you’re doing it at thirty-eight, it’s foul. People don’t know. We don’t know ourselves so we tell ourselves what we really know is other people.
    We could say the depth of pain we feel for the lovers who’ve left us is because we knew them so well.
    I have intense pain for Dr. R and longing and actually a genuine connection. But I didn’t know him at all. And in that sense, he is a safety zone. The safest and also most challenging loss I can conjure. I mean, who is it I’m longing for? I know a little bit from our sessions and a little bit from his obituary.
    He loved: Barbara (obituary).
    He loved: Sam and Andy (obituary).
    He loved:
The West Wing
(our sessions).
    He loved: windsurfing (obituary).
    He taught at: Columbia (Barbara told me).
    He specialized in: cocaine psychosis (his books on Amazon).
    He summered in: the Hamptons (our sessions).
    He loved: musicals (our sessions).
    I don’t know where he died. I don’t know how he died. I need to know.
    I do know that Dr. R has been in my life for over eight years because I am growing sad wondering what he would make of Barack Obama. And then silly things. When someone dies too young you think of all the things he will miss, his children growing up, his twilight years with his wife, but you also say, “I cannot believe he missed Tina Fey’s impersonation of Sarah Palin.” You stretch heavenward for his wisdom (regardless of whether you believe in heaven, it’s where you stretch, much as suicides who jump off bridges die with dislocated arms, instinctively trying to grab back on) and in the same breath can’t stand that he missed out on Tina Fey’s impression of a woman he didn’t live to see.

CHAPTER 8
    IT’S JUST OVER SIX MONTHS since I got out of the hospital and I want to watch election coverage with my friends around me, but my house is too filthy to allow anyone in, so I rent a hotel room. I am still living in disarray; I am still spending money wildly (easier to rent a hotel suite than to tidy up); I still cannot understand why anyone thinks my cutting is problematic. Oh! Here’s something funny! When I got back from hospital, Bad Boyfriend and my English Flatmate had become a couple. So I’m in contact with neither. But I am not too upset, because there’s a boy—Mike—whose affection I am determined to hunt down and kill. It used to be material objects I felt I needed to be happy. At eleven, I knew “things would be better if only I had a floor-length floral skirt in autumn colors.” Grandma knuckled down and made the skirt of my imagination for me. I