Jet lag
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In a different plane (plane?) of existence, a dimension that exists in the shadows of the rest. Waking up at an odd hour, in the quiet hollow of night, when everything feels dead. It is different from staying up because of doomscrolling—instead it feels wrong, like waking up from a nightmare into another, like being somewhere you are not meant to be, like fingers clawing in the dirt of a grave. The dull thought, like a refrain, about the melatonin that failed.
The day is also similar abject: the light is searing and offputting, the mind foggy and slow and zombie-like. I fumble, stare at life through dark sunglasses. I force contact lenses in my eyes so they are, against their will, made to stay open. The sleep has encrusted itself around my eyeballs. For someone who restricts caffeine in her life to prevent any sort of dependence on anything, I count a fourth cup reluctantly. (At least now I know that caffeine does work for me, the way my eyes brightened and the world came into sharpness for the two hours after a drink of coffee.)
To cure my jet lag—lag from jet—I decided I would stay awake on my twelve hour flight the moment it was daytime in Singapore. Like whiplash, forcing an entry into a different time. Post-dinner the plane around me hummed into darkness and sleep. My screen stayed lit, rebelliously, in the dark. After watching The Room Next Door and Good Will Hunting my cinephilic enthusiasm had waned and yet I forced myself to start Nomadland. As I watched Frances McDormand trudge depressingly, alone, in the frigid outside I felt like I was torturing myself. Me, alone, in this suffocating plane of sleeping strangers in the dark, watching her be alone in the suffocating open. When the turbulence hit I felt more claustrophobic. On a boat or in a car you can crack a window open for fresh air. On a plane you can’t open a window and let something tangible and seemingly sentient (to me!) slamdunk you into consciousness. Here I felt nauseous and resigned to my fate for the next eight, nine hours. This is why I don’t get frustrated when children start screaming on a place. I imagine the child as a physical representation of the voice in my head that wants to be let out. I wish I could be screaming. Sitting, standing, clawing face and skin out. Instead I stoically remind myself I have free will to watch nonsense to mute my brain, not mirror it, if I so please—no need to be arthouse cinephile pretentious all the time!—and after ten minutes of mulling over this I switch to a sitcom as the cries intensify and the darkness continues.
Coming home after so long I felt like a foreign cell in a being where the antibodies had failed to detect me. I was in Zurich for the interval between Paris and Singapore. Paris, the illusory interim period and Singapore, the reality I was running away from but still found myself plummeting towards. Zurich then as purgatory, slow death. Surrounded by people I loved and who loved me and yet feeling incredibly vulnerable and alone. Living within a postcard trying to process a strange expulsion of self, an intense awareness of the end of all I was experiencing. Time is my biggest enemy, my shortfall,—I could never fully settle into anything, or enjoy anything, already dressed in all-black and mourning whatever I was living, aware of its eventual demise. I would stare at the ceiling in whatever bed I was lying in at the moment and think: in the future I’ll remember myself thinking of this very moment in the past; the past being that present moment. Does that make sense? I’ve done this all my life. Lag of jet but also lag of self. Or perhaps a painfully acute awareness and denial of the passing time. I battle and reject the temporal forever, whatever forever means.
In purgatory nothing is real. When you are far away from the familiar it feels easy to detach and ignore anyone and everyone. So easy it feels almost ridiculous, to be able to hold up a blade and slice off the threads that keep you tied to people. In this non-existent dimension I become a person who climbs up mountains, each step with intense awareness that it could be the wrong one and I’ll plummet to my death. Space, then, not just time, as something I found myself questioning. As I went through the motions of everything I would suddenly stop and look around me and think, where the fuck am I? What bizarre corner of the world have I found myself with, next to people I barely know and may never meet again? How did I even get here? Who am I, really? Surrounded by strangers in a corner of the earth I’ve never been to and will never return to again, as the space I exist in will be continually manipulated by the time that will never stop.
Sit on a rock at the edge of the continent as you watch the waves crash. Sit in a bus at an odd hour and speed by streets that you’ll never walk on, with names you can’t pronounce. Sit in a plane that exists in-between earth and space, hurtling somewhere. I’m just here for the ride and I can disappear anywhere, anytime. I am someone and no one. I’m flying to the future but existing in the past. My body struggles to play catchup. I’m thinking about the next cup of coffee.
