Like fireworks and nature, the Glastonbury festival can be seen as a metaphor for anything. As you read this, all my best friends are groin-deep in the emotional effluvia of the closing day of the festival, miles away from roads, baths, real life. I am at home, where I perform essential tasks such as texting them to say that Michael Jackson has died, say, or that I’ve seen them on telly, eyes the size of London, sitting on the shoulders of a man with a Bart Simpson tattoo.

Which I’m delighted about – don’t get me wrong. I’m delighted to be here, at a great distance, in part because I’m at no risk of trenchfoot, but also because, from here, I can see everything quite clearly. I have an affliction. Like synesthesia, but for metaphor. Glastonbury offers many opportunities for comparison.

There’s a flyer you get of stage times and events, and on the Friday it gleams with promise. First you’ll pop to Pussy Riot in conversation with David Starkey, then at 3pm Tricky on the Compeed stage, where you’ll meet up with Yusef and Anna and chill out in the poetry tent before heading to the Sudocrem pop-up etc etc.

Of course, like the great life plans you had – to travel, and take evening classes in psychotherapy, and have a brief yet meaningful affair with a much older man before moving to Barcelona and launching a cookery app – the flyer gets muddied.

By midday you’ve lost Sunday. The stage times were scribbled over with directions to the secret bar. You had a lanyard once, but used it to tie your tent together. The mud turns your flyer into a papier-mache coaster, but it’s not until Saturday afternoon that you lose it altogether, somewhere between where you are and where you’re meant to be.

You lose your friends, too, and your phone’s dead and the whole shape of your future is wobbling. Waiting in a queue for a wee you see diamonds by the side of the path, except that when you approach you realise they’re shards of smashed wing mirror. You wade, searching, through the swampy detritus of a farm gone bad. Everything is heavy with meaning. Until you’re sitting by someone else’s fire and laughing like a horse and oh you’re fine.

You mean to see a load of new bands, but the only music you catch is Steve Winwood. And you realise: you’re a dad.

At Glastonbury, as in life, nobody quite knows what to do with their baby. Do you just strap it to your chest and hope for the best? A pair of noise-reducing headphones, an anti-bac wipe, don’t look over in that direction where the very high sex is happening, just keep looking forward, keep looking forward? During Kanye do you sort of forget they exist? Do you lose your Ziploc bag of apple slices, and then at 7am secretly wish you’d turned out to be infertile? Or do you push your pram through the mud and the bodies, and try, really try, to keep on having fun?

So often it’s easier to think of life as an immersive theatrical experience. Helpful to look at the sky in wonder and silently say: “Doesn’t it look real!” but to know that, of course, nothing is. The terrible Glastonbury drugs, the sex in tents – these are metaphors for our drowned expectations. The job, the flat, the relationship: everything looks different when you wake up in the most awful sunshine of your life and your mouth tastes of hair.

The end comes. You’re standing in broken flip-flops thinking: last week this was literally all fields. Then the music starts again, and a hundred thousand strangers all drop their pulled-pork buns and half-drunk green Cokes and start running towards the sun in all their youth. And you start following them, and then you stop, and you think: “Nah.”

Email Eva at e.wiseman@observer.co.uk. Follow Eva on Twitter @EvaWiseman