I’m writing this from a plane that is somewhere between a place called Apia and Port Moseby. Wendy and I are on our at to Sydney, but I am starting to feel like we have been travelling forever and are in a version of purgatory that has been outsourced to Qantas (I can verify Dante’s statement that one can never be truly comfortable in a chair in purgatory).
The reason I’m feeling this isn’t due to the length of the journey (we’re 8 hours into the 13 hour flight that follows the 6 hour flight to LAX), rather, it’s the dark.
I left work in NYC at 3 on December 19th in a snow storm. The storm made it get darker even earlier on one of the year’s shortest days. Since then, we have been flying West, so the duration of our flight is offset by our ‘gain’ in time change. The net result is that we have been in the dark for almost a day – three hours to get to the airport in the storm, a two hour delay, a six hour flight to LA followed by a two hour stopover and now eight hours across the Pacific.
I literally have no idea what time it is. My phone mocks me as it insists that it is 1:04pm, but I think that it changed time zones in LA -and darkness at 1pm means that it’s either wrong or the Jehovah’s Witnesses were right and the Rapture is upon us. I am beginning to understand how people in solitary confinement could go mad.
Fortunately I have an inflight map that is showing us inching towards Australia so I know that the sun shall rise again.