Being back

Aug 30, 2006 15:59

I am now very much back in the UK. This is mostly a good thing - the summer has been good, working and seeing everyone I never see anymore. I have learned a lot (though not necessarily what I had planned on learning) and I've been paid a decent amount of money for doing not very much (mostly the odd interesting task, surfing the internet, working on my dissertation, and looking up potential future jobs). Being at home has been really nice - much better than anticipated considering the extended time with my parents required. Also, being in London has been pretty awesome... catching up with so many people has been great, and my overall dislike of London is waning, which is good since most probably in a year from now I will be moving back here for the forseeable future.

Being back in Edinburgh is much weirder. My friend Matt described it as being feeling like you are back in a room you haven't been in for a while and where everying is the same but all the furniture has been shifted slightly. I think that's about the best way to describe it. Mostly this is a result of the fact that I have been away for an entire year, and things for me have changed, even though my life there hasn't changed at all. Initially I missed Edinburgh so much, but then I established a life in bcn and moved on, and now I feel like I've literally gone back in time - that I'm going back to something that in some ways I've outgrown. Nowhere did I feel this more strongly than when I was in Bedlam - I felt like nothing and yet everything had changed - that I was visiting it and I was 35, and yet that I was still there.

I think mostly what I need is to be in my own flat with penelope, and everyone back in town, and work and applications to be getting on with, and I will be struck again with a sense of belonging back in Edinburgh, rather than just being a visitor. I need my non-theatre friends back - I need a purpose. Matt said the displaced feeling goes away after about a week or so, which I'm looking forward to, because it's not something I'm really enjoying. I miss bcn now, in a way I wasn't anticipating. I want to be back there, doing the things I did with those people - I don't think I fully appreciated what was ending.

At the same time, a huge portion of the people I value most are in Edinburgh - and getting back there and back into those friendships will be great, if something of a mind warp for a while.
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