I’ve been home for four days, but my body still begins to rise every evening around 10 PM, preparing its energies for a day that is not coming. It’s a thirteen hour time difference between here and Borneo. My computer, meanwhile, keeps accessing the Lao version of Google (“Would you like us to translate?”) and Expedia defaults to “.my”.

Nothing has caught up yet. I have goosebumps in full sun at high noon, when it’s 65°F out.

I can hear my family in the garage, smell the cup of coffee at my elbow, feel the pages of this book I’m rereading, think about apologizing to so-and-so, consider a job, forget about whatshisface, unsubscribe from that spam mail, loosely draw the outlines of an indeterminate future — what am I going to do now? — etc.

Yesterday I opened an IRA while being interviewed by a national women’s magazine about my hair (short) and then listened to Connie Francis by tilting my phone into the open mouth of an old tea cup.

“Your life is not real,” says my best friend, a grad student, chewing on her pencil. I don’t think she means it as an insult.