What even time is it?

I’m coming to. Again. It’s hard to call it “awake.” I shouldn’t be hungry. It’s dark. It smells like too-early dark, but I suspect it is, instead, still too-late. What could I smell anyway? My nose is somehow both running and cracked like a salt flat from too much manufactured cold air.

I fumble with my phone.

4:46.

I must be home. Otherwise the sun would already be up. My nose, in spite of its condition, is right. I’ve been accused of trying too hard for liking military time, 24-hour clocks. That started as a necessity to use the medical devices of my early teens which I depended on, designed by Swiss engineers, but this is exactly why I like it now. There’s no guessing. I sigh. It’s either get up and wait to stare at the sun when it does arrive, or go back to sleep and wake up again… when? The cat is crying still, like it has been a long, slow stream of lows and meows from the night before. His echolocation reveals reality. We’ve been “home” for two days now, but I am still not sure we’re “here.”

I sit up in the dark. The fan is blowing, and the TV is off. I scratch under my arm, blearing through a purgatory of time where bodily rhythms push and fail to match the steadily plotted course of clocks. It is Sisyphean and surreal.

Each year older I get, it takes a little bit longer to recover from things like this. And that’s okay. Aging feels like it comes in fits and starts. Most of the year you’re in one place, moving through time linearly. Then like a long-haul flight, 7,000 miles at a time, whole days disappear and leave you standing at the baggage carousel. Your mouth slacks as the cases keep coming, each with your name and address stamped on the side. Stories, experiences, fears, and validations all accumulate. It gets heavier as you go, but you keep carrying it. As you need more breaks, you take more opportunities to rummage through the contents. Sifting through the souvenirs of a life lived, sometimes you think How did I get here? You wonder Where am I going next? Each time you thumb through that same old notebook, wrinkled and stained, you say How could this have been different?

Back at the airport, it is paradoxically chaotic and safe. From dead sleep to scramble, it is bodies in motion out of time. Airside, you move beyond the imagined boundaries of the world around you. It is a fugue state, conveniently never more than 100 feet from a sandwich or a Bloody Mary. To live is to hold the boarding pass. When your group is called, will you be waiting on the gate or somewhere in terminal limbo?

Wheeling another heavy bag down the humid jetway, I think Where does this even go?