The last time I flew to Australia, five years ago, I experienced the worst jetlag of my life. I didn’t sleep on the flight and then I didn’t sleep the entire first night there, either, too afraid of spiders in my basement room. Then at about four am local time I fired up my phone torch to assess the risks and discovered, horrifically, that I was pooled in sweat and all my limbs were covered in strange, painless blisters, as if my skin had transformed into bubble wrap. I was allergic to the mattress. When I finally emerged, disoriented, into morning sun after three nights without sleep, I made it to a coffee shop and promptly lost my mind. I felt like I was white-knuckling the sides of the table so that I wouldn’t fall off the earth, that nothing was real, unsure if people could even see me. The world hovered around me in a bright, artificial cloud, and I knew with utter certainty that, if I was not already dead, I was about to die. I did what I could – I rang my best friend, who talked to me soothingly, and then I walked to the beach and cried hysterically. What was I going to do, being on the other side of the world? I had to stay in place and try to find my way back to some kind of normality, which eventually happened, but I didn’t feel quite right for the whole holiday.
I’ve just been in Australia again, anxiously anticipating a repeat, but this time the jetlag acted not on my mind so much as my body. My period was two weeks late, my appetite vanished, I discovered mysterious red-raw wounds on my feet that healed as quickly as they appeared, twisted my ankle somehow without noticing. When putting in my earrings one of them slipped into a piercing hole that had been closed for twenty-five years. I’d had my ears pierced for one week when I was ten when they got infected, taking the earrings out and letting the holes close immediately, but the puncture felt healed, recent. At all times I was sweaty, permeable, easily woundable. Out of sync. Eventually in the last days of the holiday I became sicker than I had been in a long time, bedridden and shivering with a cough that boomed from the bottom of my lungs and made my ribs feel bruised. Lying down I worried feverishly about the fan above me wheeling off, falling onto my head.
But before this there was a long journey in a camper van, staying in the mountains and by the sea, listening to torrential rain falling in the night and waking to new, shining heat. So many beaches, and dips in rockpool and ocean. I was spooked by a town called Eden with a gigantic cemetery on the seafront, the graves looking out on the waves, where we barely saw anyone else and the wind was so strong that the sand blasting against our skin was painful. We saw huge pelicans on the bodies of water, bigger than you expect, and uncanny magpies which are not the same as our magpies – larger, meaner, with an unearthly call that verges on the mechanical. We saw neon crayfish in the pooling water around waterfalls and drove unexpectedly into almost-total fog as we went through the Blue Mountains, going as slowly as we could. We went through a town surrounded by lakes where the sky was blistered with sunset and almost everything was closed except for a restaurant where we were the last people there, eating oysters as the last of the sun sank into darkness. So many dead wombats and kangaroos by the side of the road that we stopped counting. Incredible heat, the sun prickling at our skin in seconds.
I’m still on my way home as I type this, writing this from six hours into an eight hour stopover at Beijing airport. My body doesn’t know what time it should be on, what it should be eating, whether it should be awake or asleep, whether it’s back to full health or teetering on the edge of sickness again. All I can be at this stage of travel is a sprawling creature with zero inhibitions, focussed only on clawing back whatever comfort there is. I don’t care who sees me contorted across two chairs, if it grants me half an hour of sleep; I’m greedy for it, existing only in an interplay between discomfort and slightly less discomfort, coaxingly asking myself what small thing could help when I feel myself toddler-like, on the verge of tears. It works, to just think rationally whether there is one tiny thing that could improve the current situation. Sometimes though there is just nothing to be done.
My sister looked after me when I couldn’t get out of bed and while I was sad she had to do it I was so grateful for her kindnesses, how she brought me toast and multivitamins and we sat under a blanket watching films. One morning I couldn’t stop coughing just as I thought I was turning a corner, and she caught me as I ran up the stairs, unable to breathe and crying, and sat with me on the edge of the bathtub until my breath came back. We’ve missed a lot of those everyday moments, me and her, as she lives so far away. So many parts of me have felt out of sync. The tenderness of her hand rubbing my back. How lucky I am to have that, I thought at the airport a few hours ago, a different airport, crying with my head turned. How lucky I have been.
Such a beautiful and evocative description- both of your trip and your sickness! Hope you feel better soon.
So tender and beautiful x