Travel Fever → (symptom) → Homesickness → (disease) → Go home → (Solution) → Going home → (solution in action) → Thoughts on the way →
1. The Sleeper
During my travels, I began to notice something quietly unsettling: everyone I met already lived somewhere else. Not geographically, but digitally. Their thumbs twitched with muscle memory, their attention split between the here and the feed, their stories pre-formatted for later upload. They were all on social media. I was not. The omission followed me like a missing limb. It made me feel out of date, like a device that still works perfectly but no longer fits any socket. Obsolete. A conceptual fossil. Like zenzizenzizenzic—a word so precise, so overqualified, that it describes almost nothing anyone actually needs anymore. Useful once, impressive still, but mostly a curiosity now, brought out to prove that something once existed.
In response—or perhaps in quiet rebellion—I clung more fiercely to one of my few guilty pleasures: sleeping. Not napping, not collapsing, but sleeping with intention. I am a sleeper. The sleeper, at least in my own private mythology. And if you'll forgive the slip of the tongue, or rather the productive mishearing of it, sleeper becomes slipper, and slipper becomes Sleipnir—the eight-legged horse, impossible and divine, carrying gods between worlds. Sleep, then, is my transport. My mythology. My way of traveling without posting proof.
Eight legs, eight hours. No more. No less. That is the pact. Eight hours of sanctioned disappearance, where no updates are required and no relevance is measured. While others scroll to stay visible, I lie still to remain intact. That is my indulgence, my small heresy against constant presence. In a world obsessed with being seen, I choose—nightly, stubbornly—to be unconscious.
2. Slipping Through Pop
Many cities traveled, their names stacking up like stickers on luggage, yet few countries truly explored. That distinction matters. Cities are performances; countries are conversations. Somewhere between airports and arrival halls, a decision congealed—not announced, not celebrated, simply accepted. The map was no longer geographic. It was cultural.
Pop culture, I realized, has finished its slow evolution into religion. It has saints with stage names, relics in the form of merch, rituals performed nightly before glowing rectangles. Pop stars are no longer merely admired; they are worshiped, revered as deities whose lyrics function as scripture and whose scandals are studied with theological intensity. Pilgrimages are made to concerts. Confessions happen in comment sections. Faith is measured in follows.
And as for man's best friend, that is the daughter of a Carpenter. Not the son of a carpenter but the daughter of a Carpenter. Miracle worker, she turned an espresso into a diamond. At least in France.
3. Popped Love Bubble
My love life was too short for the shorts, tequila quilled in apple (love) then creamed, rebel lion crushed ruthlessly like runes with the rule book/ Decoded, time offed, zeitgeiber off the cycle, zitella sighting the elusive zigzaggery and opting for the zazzy alternative/Showboat in the zoo, zoning out with the distress flows, gadzooks!
4. Bumbling Through/Coping Playlist
breaking news: Chef DredsOut of State for the Winter Ahead so Havana can KICK BACK, IRIS OUT for the Jack Harlow Combo Meal. Dinner For One on the Chaise Longue is so Relaxin', like Ev'ry Time We Say Goodbye. HEHEHE, I Want Another Affair.