Jessica Traynor

Everything feels muted.

The sound of the waves, the traffic passing on the main road.

The instructor tells us to breathe in.

I close my eyes and wait for moonrise.

The full moon has long been linked to madness.

My first experience of closeness with a person suffering from mental health issues was my teenage friendship with Lydia.

Just as we finished secondary school, Lydia's mom moved to another country with her new husband.

Her dad had a new family.

One night in the pub, Lydia told me she'd been thrown out of her college dorm, so I took her home to the two-bed house I lived in with my mom.

but Lydia was too big for our small house she kept using up all the milk making hot chocolate in the microwave she kept trying to atone by cleaning at odd times she jerked the hoover back and forth across the floor knocking things over my mum and I had our own rhythms and they were not Lydia's rhythms but she felt loved she told us

In the play Othello, after the murder of Desdemona, Othello says, it is the very error of the moon, she comes nearer the earth than she was wont and makes men mad.

Does the moon make us mad?

A 2018 study showed that in patients with bipolar disorder, a switch from mania to depression tracked the lunar month.

Lydia did not fit any cliche of lunacy that I knew.

She was just so sad sometimes.

Her need was wide and deep and it swallowed light.

When we were teenagers, this was normal.

But it is hard to carry that need into the world.

We stopped being proper friends around our early 20s.

There was no falling out.