Like all the best drugs...

...she left me with one fucker of a comedown. The entire of July has felt like one endless eccy Tuesday. Once the sparkle has gone, and the fuzzy warm early-stage comedown has gone (the high has passed but everything is cotton-wool wrapped, and still somehow fine), and some time has passed, and then the serotonin crash hits like a freight train. I am some snarling, hissing, ungenerous beast I don't even recognize, fatalistic, jealous, cruel. Wildly catastrophising: this is how it is and ever shall be. Not for a moment, not for a day, not even for a weekend, but on and on and on. Lashing out at everything and everyone around me.

Standard break-up narratives don't even fit here, that's not what it's like: it's like coming down, hard, from a sublime high on the best drugs I've ever tried.

I escape into projects (frantically hammering out new objects: see, see I create, I make things, I am not so useless, not so worthless), the glow of new friendships, into dairy fantasies and up trees. I climbed right up the middle of the huge, tangled mandarin tree in the backyard today, over-stretched myself, braced against wobbling branches, took stupid risks directly over tetanus-guaranteed, rusty-nail wood scattered around the base. Shoved myself bodily through tangled twigs and spiders webs. For a heavy bag of fruit over my shoulder, for scratches on my hands and arms, for spiders in my hair, for being somewhere else for a moment.

I will go back to the farm for a while, undoubtedly (it's what I do when my head breaks, this year), and take pleasure in baby calf joy, warm animal-smells, learning to milk cows, learning to make cheese and growing strong on the pure luxury of as much raw, fresh milk as it's possible to drink in five days.

Eventually, eventually, I will stop being a Problem and become myself again. Not yet, but eventually.