jet lag

For the first two days after my arrival in California, I went to sleep at 9pm and woke up at 6am. The next few days, I went to sleep at midnight and woke up at 8am. That was that for temporal jet lag.

The bigger challenge is the emotional and relational jet lag. I'd been living on the opposite side of the world from the people once woven into my daily life. I'd been awake when they'd been sleeping and vice versa. I forget what topics are favored. Even worse, I forget what subjects are sensitive - until after the words are well out of my mouth and the reactions have set in. My points of reference have changed. My mind is a tangle of compare-and-contrast that, for the most part, defies coherent articulation. What I do manage to verbalize does not seem to engender the same level of interest in the listeners as in the speaker.

A year is not very long, but lots of little things happen in that span of time. People change. People move; they move on. This is all perfectly normal: the same would've happened regardless of where I'd spent the past dozen months. Absence simply magnifies the difference, the same way a child's growth or an elder's aging seems much more dramatic to those who see them but rarely. I suspect some of this lag will dissipate with time, but some is permanent and there's no sleeping it off.