Some places soak up memories and show an indent of them, if you know where to look. Near the cold stone steps at Euston Station, the rails around Piccadilly Circus, the underground exit at Trafalgar Square, a crossroad here and a traffic light there. Ghosts laugh behind my back as I step out of the train and get absorbed by the crowd.

My girlfriend hugs me as if I had just faced the fire squad and got a last minute reprieve.

'You made it!'

I was drunk on London's colours, sounds and slate grey buildings sneering at me from their great heights before I had my first gin and tonic.

'I need to drown', I told the barman at the pub. He was sympathetic, and shook the bottle into my glass instead of measuring up the right amount. By the time I sat down in the theatre, I couldn't remember why I was there.

Feeling nothing is wonderful. Perhaps this is what some people's heaven must be like: not the white and fluffy clouds of eternal happiness, nor the sublime vicinity to God. Just a break from pain would be gratefully enough.

The play: Luigi Pirandello's "Six characters in search of an author".
Red curtains still drawn, people whispering around us. Pearls and jeans. Students and couples.

I giggled hysterically, with Italian girlfriend n.1 occasionally elbowing me in the ribs, and Italian girlfriend n.2 shaking her head in disbelief.

'How many drinks have you had?'

'Just the one.'

'How can you be drunk then?'

'Lack of practice.'

The play was a clotted mass of philosophical theories about individuals carrying their own, set-in-stone story within them (the six characters looking for somebody to tell their story and make them come alive) and other people whose spirit flows and flickers, never to stay the same. I suppose it was provocative work, meant to make the audience question what reality may really amount to.

I wallowed in the feel-nothing vacuum until the scene in which the little girl gets sexually abused by her stepfather. That sobered me up so incredibly quickly that I wondered whether I had been drunk at all.

Kicked back into the real evening, I tried hard to regain access to nothingness but even another trip to the pub after the theatre failed to delete me from myself.

'It will get easier, sweetie', said my friend as she deposited me on the homebound train.

Everywhere at Euston station and in every carriage on the train, men in suits and stained ties ate greasy burgers and pretended not to be drunk.

'Did you have a nice time tonight?', slurred the one sitting next to me, scrunching up the empty bag. His tie was flapping on his shoulder.

'I feel like tonight happened to someone else, really', I smiled at him.

'Oh, that's good, I'm glad to hear', he said, before slumping into a catatonic stupor, like everybody else on the train.

I left London behind as the train careered down the tracks and towards my very own private hell.

Maybe Pirandello is right: some things only live inside your head. If you starve them of thoughts and time, eventually they will die accordingly.