jetlag ovenbird While my circadian rhythms are definitely not functioning, the thing that lags the most is presence. I just can’t seem to BE here. I make breakfast, I walk the dog, but I haven’t fully landed. Pieces of me snow down like cottonwood fluff and I can’t possibly gather it all up, turn it into something coherent. Why don’t we talk about the human capacity for sliding between multiple realities? My brain feeds me its own version of ayahuasca (today’s dose is a sludge of sleep deprivation, anxiety, and grief). One sip and my mind is unmoored. It happens all the time. Bits of song keep erupting as if someone is singing directly into my ear, people talk to me but I’m not really here. I’m still in the in-between, somewhere on the road from one ghost life to another. A hand could pass straight through me. And it does. 250504 ... ovenbird Since beginning this blathe I have discovered that jet_lag is two words, not one, but an error seems apt for a state that steals sleep and dreams and leaves my jaw aching from clenching my teeth all night. I've woken too early, which makes no sense. It's 4 am in the place I came from and my body should think it's the middle of the night. It couldn't find the doorway into sleep until far too late and now it trips into waking far too early. This leaves me with a buzz of exhaustion that settles around my eyes and sinks a headache into my temples. I pay to be here and the physical price gets higher each time. My aging body protests loudly against disruptions to carefully honed systems. It tells me over and over that I don't belong here. But it's wrong. My body may have rhythms synced with a place where the sun has yet to rise, but here is where my heart sings no matter how off key or out_of_time. 250723 ... ovenbird I eked out only four hours of sleep yet, surprisingly, my heart rate is slow and steady. The anxiety that hitched a ride from the west coast is quiet. After coming all this way it seems content to leave me to the whims of a more straightforward exhaustion, something that at least allows the peace of a body untroubled by a misfiring nervous system and a mind untroubled by darkness. 250724 what's it to you? who go blather from