(I promise the rest of my NC blog will be jumbled together and in bulletpoint form, with actual events and perhaps pictures, so stick with me just a little longer.)
When I first landed at the Minneapolis airport after 11 hours of flying, I was jetlagged, cramped, and not thinking clearly. My body was still on Japan time (somewhere around 4:00 a.m.) and my brain was mush. As I walked through the hallway towards the gate whose flight would take me to Raleigh, I stared openly at all the non-Japanese people and clutched my handbag to my chest as if I were lost in the middle of some unknown jungle, instead of just making a trip through an airport. Everything seemed both reassuringly familiar but disastrously different at the same time, and I waited for my flight in a fog of culture shock and sleepiness, listening to the English all around me.
Three hours later, we touched down at RDU, but I couldn’t summon the energy to cheer. Even when I realized that no one was waiting for me at the gate, I just sleepwalked over to baggage claim, then propped myself up against a pole while waiting for someone to show up. It was only about three minutes later when I saw my mom come flying through the crowd towards me to envelop me in a huge bear hug. Traffic had been bad, she explained with her arms around me, and they couldn’t get to the airport on time.
On the two-and-a-half-hour drive back to Winston-Salem, I made myself stay awake, but as soon as we got home I had a shower and hit the hay. I slept from 10:00 p.m. to 1:00 the next afternoon.
The next day, Saturday, I sat in mom’s backyard, reading “Spiral” by Koji Suzuki (what a terrible ending) and trying to soak up as much direct sunlight as possible, because that’s what all the articles say you should do to recover from jetlag. I don’t think I did one productive thing the entire day, and it was wonderful. Mom and I spent all day together, I played the piano a little, and didn’t do much of anything else.
I went to sleep at 11:00 p.m. and was wide-awake at 3:30 a.m.
At five, I got out of bed where I had been reading, and started to slink around the house. I couldn’t go outside because the house has an alarm system I was sure to trip. So I stayed in the kitchen and read the newspaper and ate cereal, watching the dawn slowly creep in.
Somehow I made it through the day with only one nap, and then I was, more or less, back on the right schedule.
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