Jet Lag

I woke in the long dead hours of the night, and lay staring at the clock, watching the red numbers click past like so many sheep, but sleep would not return. So I slipped quietly out of bed, and sat on the living room couch watching the snow fall outside, and the wind whip off of the roof. There in the dark of the night, crescents of snow formed around the edges of the roof, like sleep on the eyes of a giant, and the flakes glittered like falling diamonds in the streetlight. And so the hours slipped slowly by, as I sat watching the snow pile deeper on the lawn.

There is something unholy about being able to cross the world in a day. Sitting there in the dark, my bones ached with the hollowness of an exoskeleton, and my heart whistled like an empty shell, waiting for my soul to catch up to my body. Somewhere out there, in the swirls of snow, it was moving still across the cold wide ocean searching for its home.

I have been through this too many times to name. I will move through the days in a fog, and struggle through the nights in feverish thoughts, as I wait for my body and soul to reunite, and move back into phase like a generator as it searches for polarity, before electrons of life begin flowing like current through the circuits of my body and it comes back to life. Until then, I will sleep the days in semi-consciousness like Frankenstein’s creation stretched out upon the table waiting for lightning to bring me to life.

And so the snow swirls in curlicues of white outside my window, and I pull the blanket up around my chin, and lay my head against the pillow, and wait for morning.