New York is the first place I have ever felt safe. by Emma Forrest

New York is the first place I have ever felt safe.

Emma Forrest

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Categorized in : Place First New New York

Everyone asks about how I'll feel about the tattoos and scars in thirty years. I always say: "I'll like them." I've always loved damaged monuments, in architecture and in humans.

scar tattoo years

I'm in love with someone good and kind and gentle, and he's seen the darkness too, but somehow we've become each other's light.

light kind darkness

Time heals all wounds. And if it doesn't, you name them something other than wounds and agree to let them stay.

time-heals get-well names

A lot of the time in my recurring dreams, before I was diagnosed, iconic people would either be good or evil figures. I remember dreaming really basic stuff like trying to navigate the London underground, but then Paul Newman would be the only one who would direct me to the right trains. And I'm trying to remember who would direct me to the wrong ones.

evil dream people

I wouldn't say that my emotions are extreme. I'd say they are committed. My moods are the equivalent of Madonna's dancing: inappropriate but all-out. If I'm going to be sad, I might as well be the saddest a girl can get. And if I'm happy, I want to be the happiest. The trouble is, I feel highs so ecstatic that just being normal feels like a thousand-mile drop and being unhappy is excruciating.

girl dancing unhappy

He was only twenty-five.He was young enough to miss his youth just as it was slipping away. The worst kind of loss-the one that is happening as you feel it.

slipping missing loss

But I saw the pain and sadness in everything, and swirled it roun... by Emma Forrest

But I saw the pain and sadness in everything, and swirled it round my mouth like a fine wine.

sadness pain wine

I do think everything that happens in American pop culture sort of prescribes for England and does end up happening there six months later, maybe a year.

pop-culture culture thinking

In other words, it was a struggle with himself. And the product of that struggle: anger, bitterness, resentment, envy or transformation, aspiration, hope, decency..the product of that struggle is the quality of your life and the nature of your soul.

envy soul struggle

We intersect. He says he thanks every star that we existed on the same celestial plain. But here we are on earth, dirty, well used, a man-made throughway for intersecting dreams.

stars dream dirty

My thoughts are messy, my emotions are messy, my body goes in and out at will. The raised white scars on my arms and legs are the only aspect of my being that comes close to minimalism. They came from chaos, but it is hard to carve frustration and unease into the flesh. Only straight lines.

frustration body white

I think it's sort of the hypothetical point where communism and fascism meet. They love tragedy, and they love surface beauty. You just watch it play out over and over in the media. It was the English edition of Glamour who were looking for stories of Iraqi war widows, but specified that they had to be attractive.

tragedy war thinking

I envied women with signature hair-dos, signature perfumes, signature sign-offs. Novelists who tell Vogue Magazine: “I can’t live without my Smythson notebook, Pomegranate Noir cologne by Jo Malone and Frette sheets”. In the grip of madness, materialism begins to look like an admirable belief system.

vogue-magazine notebook hair

When you live with voices in your head, you are drawn inextricably to voices outside your head. Very often the voices work to confirm your worst suspicions. Or think of things you could never have imagined! There are only so many hours of the day to hate yourself.

voice hate thinking

I finally accept that not only do I not understand the death of my relationship, but I do not need to. These men were good and kind to me, they loved me and I loved them back and the shock at the finish holds no wisdom. The revelation is not that I lost them, but that I had them.

kind men needs

There is that doll dress-up quality of adorable teenage girl writer, and I never felt either as adorable as I was supposed to be, or as dark as the rumors, you know, "She must have slept with the editor," and I was like, "Oh my god, I'm still a virgin." It was very strange.

teenage girl dark

He was addicted to me and now he has gone cold turkey. He used to send me fifty texts a day. And now he is ignoring me. It's like I was once his Barack Obama. And now I am John McCain, conceding defeat like a sad-face sock puppet, knowing I have sold the best of myself. He, my electorate, not only does not want me, he actively feels pity.

turkeys knowing doe

There is a blessing in losing the one we love. It's the blessing of self-transformation. You don't have to who you were anymore. You've struggled. And now you can change. It doesn't mean that bits of that person won't cling to you, they will throughout your life, but they are now subsumed into something greater. That person has given you, in fact, the most important blessing, which is they gave you the blessing of transforming your soul into something better, something more beautiful.

blessing beautiful mean

It's all in her walk, a cartoon swagger. Part Jayne Mansfield, part Muhammad Ali. Men never know if it's an invitation upstairs or an invitation outside.

swagger cartoon men

Someone asked me the other day, "Oh your story is like Cameron Crowe's, he has the same thing of having been a teenage journalist," but he was a guy and you just add gender into the mix, it's a 16-year-old girl with adults and rock stars, and it's tough.

teenage guy girl