This is where the whole world goes on turning, this is where we come undone.

I have just finished rewatching “Inception”, a film about dreams and dreams within dreams, about reality, about perception, about the people you trust to let in.

I have also just left Iona, the place I have called home for two years now. This is not like other places I have left - university flats or holidays or residential courses. Unlike all of those, while I have left, life there goes on and that world continues to evolve without me. An ever changing community of people I have been part of continues, and although I am part of its life in many ways, I am now no longer part of its core.

I said that this is not like other places I have left, but in many ways the transition period remains the same. Like in dreams, like in the film I find it hard once I have left a place to fully remember what it was like, to be able to access those feelings, the complexity and reality. After only a few hours I felt like two years had been a dream which I was now waking up from. A dream which I loved and am remembering the joy it brought (as well as the nightmare of it all), but now that is fading fast. I have not left my parents’ house in three days. I feel tired, emotional, angry, able to be pushed at the slightest thing and I have not talked to anyone outside my immediate family who I share a house with... and perhaps your suggestion would be that I get up, open the front door, breathe in the fresh autumn air, get on a bus, phone up my friends in Edinburgh, meet up with them... But it is there that I feel paralysed. Because once I leave here; here where I know that there was another world, where I can believe I was part of it, where I feel so homesick in a way, well that is when you wake up, isn’t it? That is when you shake your head of the dream world and live in the reality you are presented with.

Of course all this talk of dreams confuses things. Of course my life on Iona was not a dream, it remains as much a part of my reality as right now does. However, that is not necessarily the perception of the thing in my mind at this precise moment in time. And that may be because of the last part I mentioned, the people you trust to let in.

I am terrible at keeping in touch with people who are not in the same place as me. It’s exactly as I have been saying; I find it incredibly hard to remember a world outside the one I am living. I would say that more than any place in my life, I have let more people in, let more people see the ‘real me’, and truly depended on other people during my time on Iona. It has only been three days, but it is this that I miss more than the constantly changing view of the Burg or the sound of rain in the cloisters. I miss waving to people as they drive by, rounding the corner into a bear hug, going to a certain place because you know that person will be there, standing in front of a group of fifty strangers for an hour and being completely yourself because you know that in an hour they will no longer be strangers...

There is no conclusion here. There’s no, ‘this is how I am going to wrap everything up prettily and make it OK’. I know that to live fully one has to leave behind where they have come from, take with them what they have learned and acquired, lay down the things that you will not be able to carry and live in hope. But that is hard right now.

So perhaps you will excuse me if I see you here and I seem distant, sad, angry, dull, empty. Or if you are elsewhere and I seem needy, clingy, or distant and aloof. None of these are a reflection on you. I care about you and I want you still to be in my life. I want to reconnect with those who I am returning to, and I want to stay connected to those I have left. I don’t know how to do it and it all seems like I’m in a bit of a trance right now. But I need to remember that all of these things are reality, and maybe for the people to remind me every now and again that they are a reality and not a figment of my imagination or part of a dream. I think that’s really the only way it works. With other people. It’s like in “Into the Wild”, “happiness is only real when shared.”