Jetlag Is A Place

I Wish I Could LIve There, Never Congealing Into Me

A stream of cars arrives from under the water.

My wife and I arrived in Japan “yesterday.” Days lose their meaning when you spend 14 hours in the air and arrive at roughly the same time you left. In that airplane, my soul travels faster than all my fears, and it will take a day for them to catch up. In the interim, I get to watch rain bead on the window, and see others go about their day far below, while I hover in a suspended state.

The inquisitor in my mind is befuddled. His questions, which usually torment me, instead unravel into meaninglessness. “What are you doing with your life?” dissolves against “What is doing?” and “Should you be working?” melts in the face of “Who am I?”

I’m amazed by heads of state or CEOs who travel relentlessly, hopping from one capital city to the next. How does one make the liminal their home? It must take a force of powerful sense of will. Do they experience their consciousness decomposing and then recomposing? Do they miss the sensation of being scattered into particles until their essence pulls them like a magnet back into shape over time?

It’s fitting that it’s soon to be Halloween. By then, my ghost will be firmly back in my meat suit, my fears and anxieties will be re-seated, and all will spook me like ghosts in the haunted house of my soul. I’ll be myself again. But until then, I’ll live dissipated, smeared over the spacetime of Tokyo like butter over toast.