I’m back from Paris.

Sort of.

It’s been four days, and I’m still waking up before the cats. I’m ravenous, so I eat a bowl of cereal and a scoop of premium vanilla ice cream with Trader Joe’s “Midnight Moo” chocolate syrup poured over it. A jet-lagged marketing exec must have come up with the name some sleepless night.

William Gibson, in Pattern Recognition, muses that jet lag is the soul trying to catch up with the body. Since I’ve been getting up for the past three nights at 5:30am East Coast time, my spirit must be partying in Manhattan. Or it’s frozen over Greenland.

Perhaps it’s in suspended in shaky orbit halfway between Los Angeles and Paris, captured by powerful gravitational influences of each metropolis. I know it’s just a matter of time before SoCal wins out, but some piece wil break off and fall back to Paris.

I’ve experienced this before. After spending 7 years, off and on, in Japan, I am never completely whole on either side of the Pacific. Maybe this is why I always struggle with sleeplessness. I imagine parts of my soul scattered about the globe like parts of Osiris’ torn body, and I am a willing, globetrotting Set, and writing is my Isis, collecting and putting the parts together again, to live and breath in temporary wholeness.