Reentry

Coming home from a trip, my friend Katherine says, is like having a crush on your weekend.

I don’t think the novelist Paolo Coelho was writing about jet lag or reentry from vacation in his book Eleven Minutes, but one sentence suits me just fine.

He says, “We all have one foot in a fairytale, and the other in the abyss.”

That’s a more elaborate expression of what my friend Cara and I say to each other when one of us comes home from a trip. We are often pretty succinct: Reentry. Or, Worst reentry ever, love. Or, with a twinge more desperation, Am I going to make it? The trip might be to Maine over a long weekend or to Ghana for two weeks, but the rules remain the same. Reentry is awful, and the only way out of it is to push through, find the anchor of routine, and keep the memories afloat in our brains and hearts, the dual centers of our vitality.

This summer, my college friend Shawna and I had the extremely good fortune to spend two weeks at a writers’ and artists’ residency in a seventeenth-century chateau in Champagne. Even though I was living and working in the French countryside and making new friends over, well, the eponymous champagne, I was still aware that my personhood — the version from home — was still with me. The trance was occasionally interrupted.

An example of my home-self piercing the dreamworld occurred on the second day as I was working at my desk overlooking the estate. I was taking in the scenery: the ripples in the pond, the verdant hills, and the cerulean sky. Out of nowhere I suddenly heard many horns honking in the near distance, but I could not see the origin of all the commotion. In my brief time here, I had barely seen two cars on the street at the same time.

More horns, then bang! One, two, three abrupt shots. Even more horns.

Panicking, I thought, well, it followed me. My country’s bellicose culture of road rage managed to find Orquevaux, France, population 50. Right here by the bubbling but tranquil stream, amid the centuries-old stone houses, their lace curtains taking the shape of the breeze, there was a horrific accident. Traffic in the narrow road couldn’t move. Tempers flared. In the ire, someone was shot.

Like what might happen on an excursion to our Atlanta Kroger, say.

But no. All that cacophony? All those dreadful meanings I’d created? A wedding party. Horns and fireworks were simply celebrating the new couple, who would use the chateau as the backdrop for their wedding photos. As I walked through the village toward my own stone house, I spotted a beautiful old Citroën festooned with wedding décor awaiting its joyous voyage.

After having been home in Atlanta for a while, I did drive to our Kroger. I had three near misses on a two-mile drive thanks to cars pulling out in front of me, way too closely for my newly adopted French countryside manner.  I blasted my horn each time, knowing the dangers, trying to remind myself that here, an encounter like this may not end in celebratory honking and Roman candles.

In that drive to the grocery, I fell into the abyss.

Quite often, the nadir of reentry is largely task-centric. Don’t forget the dentist tomorrow. Time to change the HEPA filters. Do you remember how to change the bag in the Litter Genie? The roof sweeper comes tomorrow. Make sure they don’t dump crap in the neighbor’s yard again. Did my desktop really not back up while I was away? You’re due for an oil change. We should really tackle that mountain of laundry. What did you say was the name of the company that fixes foundations?

In those first jet-lagged mornings home, the energy is manic. It’s that bizarre time when, as Shawna says, “Everything is possible, and nothing is possible.”

By 2 PM, I am catatonic.

Beyond the tactical stuff is the spiritual. In the case of the chateau, I got home thinking, Who did I become this month? What am I bringing back? Who will stay in touch, and who will recede into the horizon?

Those questions are just as real to me as, Did we really order another 18-pound bag of cat food when we already have two? Or, Why do only half of the Alexa plugs still work?

But those answers are easy.

Yes, and I don’t know.

Thinking back to my harrowing grocery run, being home was certainly no grand fête. Feeling defeated, my stomach fell, and I thought of what I might eventually tell Cara. I knew she was still in Ireland having the time of her life on her own trip with family and friends, culminating in an Irish wedding. In a few days, she would have her own reentry to face. But I remembered that all we ever need to say to each other in these moments of what genuinely feels like crisis is, I know. It’s the WORST. Even without regaling each other with every single detail of either the trip or the return to our regular lives, we would both feel heard.

These short exchanges always take away some of the sting.

In the weeks since coming home, I keep thinking of that time, not too long ago, when I careened through Champagne in my little Fiat, complete with the phrase Dolce Vita emblazoned on both side panels. I might have been on my way to pick up Nutella cookies and five-Euro Provençal rosé to share with Shawna and my new friends, shifting gears as I propelled myself alongside endless fields of sunflowers. I’d be amazed by the monolithic hay bales that gradually appeared over a mere two weeks, marking time, already pushing us into the next season.

It still soothes me to conjure those joyrides. I imagine that at the height of those fleeting summer days, the sunflowers, gently and imperceptibly turning their heads toward me, craning their necks to drink in the sun, were kindly waving me on, keeping me solidly in the fairytale.