Dear friends,
hotel rooms are strange places. They are generally anonymous and blank. Well, that doesn’t concern every hotel but let’s put it as a basic rule. People come and go, leaving fragments of their stories, their lives, which, after departure, are subsequently exorcized by the cleaning lady. And when the next guest arrives, it is as if they were the first person ever that steps inside.
Hotel rooms, though they are furnishd with a bed and a bathroom, are like numbered uninhabited islands. Sometimes I feel like a stranded person in there. Stranded in life. I wonder how many numbers I have inhabited so far. And how many times did I open them again and again with keys, magnetic cards, magic spells, a resolute kick against the door. Since more than 30 years I spent a huge amount of my lifetime in hotels. And sometimes when I enter my next room for the night, it feels as if my whole life consists out of an infinite chain of these room numbers. And every cell of my body is a little room with a number and inside a little bathroom and a little bed and a little light and a little me sitting on the bed and so on.
Is my body some kind of hotel room? A place we or someone else rented for some time, and then we leave again for good? And the name of the cleaning lady is …what? I know, comparisons tend to fall short, so does this one. What’s always left are the answers to the big questions. We are born out of the question and into the answer we go. What we are looking for is happiness. And the price for that we pay in hotel rooms, those rooms that are just for us but amazingly for everybody else at once. As if we all were just different versions of the same person.
When you have grown old like I do, everything is long ago, walls, rooms, numbers. The amount of what is, is much less compared to what was. When you’re old like me, you’re drifting like a cork on the waves of the past. Maybe you become stranded jetsam at the beach of time. Maybe someone picks you up and suberises another bottle. There are quite a lot of bottles at the beach and most of them are corckless. Someone could put a message inside the bottle. For whom? Who knows. Maybe for himself.
I wish you a wonderful Sunday.
May you all stay healthy and well and enjoy our newest ditty by tomorrow.
Marian
(April 19th, 2020)