You never know how it’s going to feel until it actually happens to you. It’s amazing what goes through your head too. Nobody can prepare you for someone slicing your ear off with a scalpel – it’s way off the syllabus at school, it’s just weird. I think that the thing which both amused me and freaked me out was the fleeting thought of “Ah, it’s just a bit of cartilage, I probably don’t need it”. How optimistic is that!? In the end, though, I did lose the hearing at that side – a combination of the damage inflicted by the knife and the weeks before I got proper medical attention.

Nobody knows why Van Gogh really cut his own ear off, but they assumed that they knew what motivated “The Van Gogh” killer. They believed the newspapers. They believed that he was a sick man who was lashing out against the world. They believed that he was a violent psychopath with blood lust. In short, they didn’t know him like I did. It’s because of how well that I got to know him that he let me survive.

He only did what he did because he was an artist. That was his way of expressing himself. He wasn’t a harsh, shallow man. He saw ugliness in many of those that people now call his victims, but that was because they were ugly people. It didn’t make him the ugly man. He was the artist, and those people were turned into his art. Things between us were different, though. When he’d done me, we talked about it. He realised that I hadn’t been changed by the removal of my ear. I’d been beautiful to him all along. I came to realise that it was about love all along.

I proved to be his weakness. Rather than let me bleed and starve to death, he came down and spent time with me. He gave me something for the pain. We talked. Because I made him stay in the same place for too long, they found him and it was because of his love for me that I survived and he was taken away.

If they ever let him out of jail, we will get married.