In the Realm of Jet Lag

In the realm of jet lag

In my regular life — the one I call ”real” — I go to sleep every night at 8:30. My body gets me up early in the morning, and by the time darkness falls I’m starting to lose consciousness, fast. All the corners of the night, therefore, everything associated with the sleeping world, is as foreign to me as Antarctica. In my regular life I know the time so well that I can usually tell the hour to the minute without looking at my watch.

Under jet lag, however, all that is thrown into convulsions. Not just the steady routine, the sense of clear divisions, the ability to get on with the world, be in sync with it. No, something deeper is dissolved. I get off a plane, 17 hours out of joint, and tell naked secrets to a person I know I don’t trust. A friend starts talking about her days — her plans, her friends, the things she wants to do — and tears start welling in my eyes, in a restaurant. I can’t sleep at night (because I’ve been sleeping in the day), and so I try to go through my routine, as I might in the normal world. But I write the wrong name on the uncharacteristically emotional letter. I shower the stranger with endearments. When the lady at the bank offers to credit my account with $3,000 in exchange for the $30,000 check I have given her (a large part of my yearly income), I smile and say, ”Have a nice day.”

I often think that I have traveled into a deeply foreign country under jet lag, somewhere more mysterious in its way than India or Morocco. A place that no human had ever been until 40 or so years ago and yet, now, a place where more and more of us spend more and more of our lives. It’s not quite a dream state, but it’s certainly not wakefulness, and though it seems as if we’re visiting another continent, there are no maps or guidebooks to this other world. There are not even any clocks.

 

~ by Errant Aesthete on 05/25/08.

Posted in New & Notable
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