Icarus, Poppies and the Sound-asleep Barrier

Before I ended up on permanent world tour, all my fantasies of a jetset life came from paparazzi photos. I saw Mick and Bianca Jagger slinking into Heathrow, defining glamour, not in the glossy magazine sense but as a spell—themselves a conjuration, an enchantment strutting through a terminal 3 in a white suit and backless Halston dress.

But for all the press we give Icarus for flying too close to the sun, we have become a world of cursed travellers, soaring faster than the cycles of sun and darkness, defying the authority of time and gravity.

If you see a winged feller, with a bouquet of poppies, that would be Hypnos the god of sleep—and you better run.

I used to think I was good at managing jet lag and maybe I was. But for a certain number of years, I forgot how to sleep in a bed at bedtime. I became narcoleptic. One moment you and I could be sipping coffee and the next I was flung sideways over a chair, mouth open like a dead body that washed up in a creek, snoring for two hours.

I text in my sleep. My management recently mentioned that they tell the new hires that I do this so they won’t thinking I’m having a brainwreck of some sort. “It’s not a stroke. She just types in her sleep. Business as usual.”

I’m not good at jet lag because no one can be good at something which is definitively bad for you.

I don’t care who you are. Fuck around with the real and true Lord of Time enough, and you will indeed find you are just another deluded airline customer, breathing stale air and trying beat the clock in the age of casual continental travel.

You might get a grace period of a day or two when you reach your destination, and every time you will think to yourself, “I’ve done it! The apps! The melatonin! The sleeping tablets,” but the unstoppable, pernicious force of jet lag, arrives on schedule. Before you know it, your house keys are left dangling in the deadbolt. You can’t remember your dog’s name and you’re crying at a commercial for a milk chocolate bar at 4am on a Wednesday.

Sleep deprivation is banned in combat by the Geneva Conventions. But it is not yet banned by me. And friends, in my race against space, time and gravity, I am losing the battle.

I am a prisoner of the war where there are no rules.

Please give my brain to science when it’s over.