So I’ve got post festival blues like you wouldn’t believe. I’m sloping around at home, leaving a trail of woe like a hormonal slug. The dog is staring at me balefully from the sofa, wondering what happened to his mummy, and I have no answers for him, just an intermittent stream of sighs into his soft ears. If you collected all the sighs that have ever been exhaled chestily in every period costume drama that’s ever been made and played them all in a row, you would pretty much be in my lounge with me right now. My dog would probably give you a ‘get me out of here’ look. I’d let you take him. I’m not cruel. 

I suppose it’s just your usual comedown stuff. No biggie. But it feels bigger when you’re in it, doesn’t it? Like you’re stuck in an opaque orb of emotion that you will never emerge from. Will you ever see the same world again? Is it all changed forever? It’s the same kind of potent comedown you can get from an amazing holiday or strange head-flipping experience, like an evening of talk with people who light your brain up like fireworks. The dancing rushes of adrenalin, oxytocin, and serotonin, all the madcap science that makes it worth being alive. I’ve just had a whole month of that. The ‘break’ away, the fun, the booze, the people, the brain-lighting, the chemicals of being human. I’m not ready to let it go, to subside, to settle. I’m mourning it.

 

Don’t get me wrong – I do feel suitably pathetic and am laughing at myself at the same time. I am not so self-indulgent as to be gracing this mess with the romantic glow of actual tragedy. Life is not one long festival, I do know that. I’m not a moron. But also – I am a moron. Half an hour ago I tried to tell myself that a month in Edinburgh had managed to wrest from me the same emotional response as leaving my high school after seven years. One month does not equal seven years. It doesn’t. And yet, today, it does.

 

I miss my friends.

 

They were the important part. I lay on squishy sofas in bars with some of my dearest friends, some of whom I hardly ever get to see, and there we all were together. And there I was, watching them all meeting and getting on like a house on fire, with so much love in my heart I don’t know how I didn’t shatter the optics with telekinetic energy.

 

We were all fun and vulnerable together. We were Funerable. That’s it. We were all there, being vulnerable together, talking, being honest and real and broken and silly, laughing like drains, and crying and hugging, and now we are apart, and we will never convene in quite the same way again. We will all change and have new stories to tell and won’t be in the same bars at the same time in the same combination with the same feelings in our hearts. That was that time, our time.

 

Everything is ultimately about the people, isn’t it? It’s not really the place, or the play, or the bits that go into the writing of the play, or the reception of the play, or even the feeling of success that can come from doing a play well, it’s the people. Your ego is there, but it’s not there for you. People are. That’s what it’s about, and that’s why it hurts when things come to an end.

 

And I’m no good at ends. At goodbyes. If I have a recurring theme in anything I ever write, it is probably that. Well, that, dads, suicide, and being a general twit in life. You’re all probably terribly bored of me. I’ll write about something new next week, I promise. But in the meantime I’m a twit huffing about in my pyjamas and I miss my friends. Give us a cuddle.