Time Warp

Okay, so I’ve only been in Trinidad a week, but I was in the States first, have been for the last six weeks, in fact. You’d think I’d be used to the time change by now, but…  After seven years of living on the other side of the world, I’ve grown accustomed to my yesterday being your today and my today being your tomorrow. I’m used to phone chats held over my wake-up coffee and your night-night toddies. It became the way the days begin. And after a time, mid-day took on the same feel the wee small hours of the morning used to have. On mornings I was home, I could chat as long as needed as the folks on the other end were in relax mode . I’d wake to an email inbox stuffed with notes, sent while I slept. I could read and respond at my leisure because no one was in their US office waiting on a reply from me—they were snug in their beds. There was usually no reason to make business calls to the U.S. during business hours—unless I wanted to hear the recording suggest I “call back during regular business hours."  My business hours were set by the stars, so to speak.

Rare were the immediate response dings of incoming email. (When they came, most where automated out-of-office or undeliverable replies). Pleasant surprises came as human-generated notes from friends burning the late night oil pinged hello. And even more rarely, old-fashioned calls. While phone calls in the night, were previously preceded by fumbling for the phone in the dark and answered with a thundering heart. Answered from the other side of the world in today’s tomorrow, meant theses calls were at best welcome interruptions, at worst met with a clear head.

Those days are gone I realized yesterday when my formerly, leisurely, mid-afternoon email session took on the feel of a tennis match with responses whizzing back almost instantaneously. The volley was so intense, at one point I broke out in a sweat—and it wasn’t caused by the 90-some percent humidity. Who needs to work out when you’ve got a real-time email rally with intermittent interference from evening/early morning Skype calls beeping in from the future to keep going?

As most things do, it calls to mind a song: Three Days…Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow: “And it does no good to wish these days would end/cause these three days start over again”…

Tomorrow? (Or is it tonight? Or yesterday?)

Doing the Time Warp, Again…