SassyBlonde

One thing that I can never quite successfully navigate after spending any amount of the time playing on the road is an epic bout with the post-tour blue funk. It always starts about the time I get off the final flight or ride home and lasts pretty much directly in proportion to the agony and/or ecstasy experienced and the length of time I've been gone, and I'm always completely knocked for a loop at how black and all-encompassing it is. This time, of course, has been no exception: when I walked off that final plane, I was already falling down the well, and as I've learned, there is no solution but to brace for impact and hope nothing breaks at the bottom, then dust yourself off and begin the long slog back up the slope to normal life.

When you travel and work closely with a group of people for so long, it's easy to become accustomed to their presence in your everyday life: you know where the are and what they're doing, almost to the minute, of every waking hour, including all of the little dramas and idiosyncrasies that make them tick and tock, so when you finally part ways it's kind of like you've lost an appendage-- you're cut off from the collective and the silence can be deafening. The worst time is at night when I can't sleep and there's no one around-- nothing to save or distract me from the loneliness I feel, the loneliness that D can't really understand and my friends here have no idea about. I've dealt with this before, but somehow I didn't think it would be quite so devastating this time-- I had hoped that time and experience would lighten the load and make it a little more bearable, but I think I let everything in a little too much this time, so extricating myself from the death of the experience is like ripping my heart out a piece at a time.

The extreme jet lag isn't helping, but I'm really hoping I can bootstrap myself into working condition for my two shows today. Maybe work will help me reclaim my place in everyday life so that I can find some sense of normalcy, but for right now I feel enveloped in a suffocating black velvet cloud, unable to navigate and find my way home. There is light, but it seems very, very far away, and the path seems long and steep this time. *sigh*