This is an extract from Emma Forrest: “Your Voice in My Head”. Now I know a lot of people have mixed opinions regarding Ms Forrest (myself included). Therefore, it’s fair to say some of you will not appreciate or be in agreement with my decision to post an extract from her book here on the blog. However, as the book clearly refers to Colin Farrell, albeit not directly by name, I do believe it is a worthy piece of information to transmit.
If you want to read my own personal opinion please go to the 'POST PAGE'.
http://gemini-postpage.blogspot.com/2011/01/re-your-voice-in-my-head.html
http://gemini-postpage.blogspot.com/2011/01/re-your-voice-in-my-head.html
EXTRACT: YOUR VOICE IN MY HEAD
It has been five years since I've self-harmed when, at a dinner in LA, I am introduced to a man with long, flowing hair who is wearing a keffiyeh. He looks like the world's campest terrorist, but he's actually a movie star with a storied reputation. In the candle-lit garden, we sit next to each other and talk, and he admits later that every single thing he tells me is intended to translate as, "I'm not like you've heard I am." It works.
"I've been seeing someone you would probably consider inappropriate," I tell my sister.
"A neo-Nazi?"
"No."
Her voice becomes dark. "Not Russell Brand? Tell me it's not Russell Brand."
Since he is neither a neo-Nazi nor Russell Brand, the family doesn't worry about my new boyfriend.
He worries a lot. He doesn't like it that my front gate doesn't close properly, so, though he is on a film set thousands of miles away, he sends builders to fix it and make me a bolt lock for my front door. He doesn't like the way I can't open my windows at night because I don't have screens to stop the cats getting out. He sends the builders to make screens.
Whenever he comes home from making a movie, he brings me back strange things. He FedExes, from Spain to LA, a single Werther's toffee. My LA girlfriends, the ones who have been here too long, snipe, "No diamonds?" and I explain I wouldn't wear diamonds, never have. "Yes, but he doesn't need to know that."
"He knows that," I say, and understand, myself, the answer to the question all the gossips are asking: "Why is he with her?"
An hour into a late-night phone call, he broaches a new topic. "When I get back from this film, let's have a miniature human, that grows."
I freeze, look around my bedroom for witnesses.
"A baby?"
"Yeah, one of them."
"You're coughing," I tell Dr R at the start of our midweek phone session. "Do you have a cold?"
"I'm fine."
I wonder if I knew this would be the last time we'd ever speak, after nearly a decade of conversation, and that's why I filled the time with flighty inanities, so he'd know I was fine.
I'm ashamed to say I wrap up my session with Dr R before our 50 minutes are up. I say he sounds sick. "I'll call you if I need you," I say, though I've a feeling it won't be for a while. I am doing so well, and have been for the past year. And then we hang up.
The next time I call, Dr R's machine picks up but with a new greeting: "Due to a medical issue, this office is closed. This machine will not take messages."
I open an email that has been sent to an account I rarely check. It has been there some time. Dr R has died, aged 53, leaving behind his wife and two boys.
Around the time I find out about Dr R, the newspapers find out about my relationship. We read obsessively the nasty comments. I am fat and ugly. He is unwashed. We are pregnant.
Yet I am happy. We are happy, and we've been this way for six months now. It's the longest I can remember. It's not mania. We don't need each other. We just really, really enjoy each other. And we're good people together. I love him and, for the first time in a relationship, I also like me.
We agree to a road trip across America when he gets back. He asks me to book out Christmas and my birthday for a trip to Istanbul. He's decided that we should definitely start trying for a baby in January. I want everything he wants.
"The only thing I know for certain," he writes, "is that I want us to be family."
He texts me from the plane to say he'll be in my arms in a few hours and our life together will begin in earnest.
Then he turns off his phone and the plane takes off.
When he arrives at my door, he is trembling. "I think I need space," he says.
It takes me a while to understand this is him leaving our relationship. A thought occurs. "Did you think that if we had a baby, you wouldn't be able to leave? Is that why you wanted me to get pregnant?"
"Maybe. That might be true." He can't look at me because he is crying so hard.
I lock myself in the bathroom. I call from under the door: "You can go now."
"Em. Please let me in! Em!"
"I'm fine. Please leave now."
"Have you cut yourself?"
"No."
"Are you going to?"
"I don't think so."
"Promise me!"
"I can't."
But I don't cut. I don't do that any more.
I need Dr R more than I ever have, but instead I have to get through this break-up myself, like normal people do. Only I'm not normal and this is not a normal situation. Because they don't know that it's over, his online fan community continue to say that I'm fat and ugly. I look at the comments about us compulsively and, though I understand that reading them is a version of self-mutilation, I can't figure out how to stop.
It is in an internet cafe, six months after our break-up, that I open an email a kindly journalist has sent me, with a photo of my ex hand in hand with his new girlfriend, wearing a dress that reveals her to be in her second trimester of their pregnancy. I'm not quite sure what I'm supposed to do. I know I'm supposed to cut myself.
Or there's that bottle of pills I've had in my handbag these last miserable months.
I walk the hour home. Eventually, the impulse fades.
Suicide has always haunted me, but I'm not going to kill myself. I am never going to kill myself. I am going to accept the darkness, and I'm going to make something from it. The bottle of pills goes back in the cupboard, for use, as needed, with headaches.
At the end of the week, Mum sends me a letter from London:
"It will get better now. You can allow the whole thing to recede. You've had your movie star. He's had his smart, funny, sensitive girl from something like the real world. You'll find someone more grounded. He'll find someone tougher. Done." It might have been written by Dr R.
SOURCE: http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2011/jan/08/emma-forrest-your-voice-my-head-extract
