10.01.00 - 01:44:05

I am fascinated by hotel rooms.

They are full of this blank, anonymous possibility. They feel clean and empty, anticipatory - some void waiting to be filled with wholeness.

In a hotel room, you know that someone else will come and make your bed, and bring you fresh towels, and replace your shampoo with another, perfect bottle - sealed.

It will be rich with some scent that you should know, it will be some brand you would never otherwise use.

There will be personal products of which you are unsure - creme rinse, citric body balm, and medicinal mouthwash. There will be things to read, and you do not hesitate to write your name in the fog on the mirror in the bathroom when you emerge - steaming and streaming - bleary and intensely focused and smelling sweet and clean.

Your name is not enough. Segment by segment, your pale, flushed skin is revealed through the keyhole of the stroke of your finger on the window, another smeared stick figure, a cloud, a flower - and a thin blue sky above. These revelations - small as they are - are soon fogged over again, but streaked and more wet than the rest, like the smoked tracks of tears.

Hotel rooms offer a sleek anonymity, they are a skin in which you can shed your skin, and become, or emerge, someone else.

No one knows you.

You are a strange. Perhaps you have some haunting mystery hidden, within, or behind. You can speak in a strange accent, and pretend not to understand the clerk's reply. You can make yourself. You can remake yourself.

I like going on a trip alone, just to feel the weight of a hotel room key in my hand, a key that is mine, and mine alone. I prefer real keys to card keys.

I don't usually go on a trip alone, particularly when I need to rent a place to stay, but that fantasy is bright-white.

Of course, it is rarely as exotic in practice.

Once, I did this on a whim.

I started driving (...it was a distant time, different. I was different. I was fragmented and chaotic. I was disintegrating. I knew the peculiar bile of panic as a rich, febrile thing upon my tongue.

Where I meant to go, or why, or how, I'm not sure. The point was to go - to leave - to abdicate all responsibility and all possibility and vanish into some mythic place where I could be clean, washed clean, free slate, erased to be rewritten. I did not follow the interstate.

The interstate would have been too easy, too fast, too slick and deft for my purposes. It was already dark, it was October or November, and I was - I was - I was -

- falling like rainwet leaves. I was smeared across the pavement, I was an impression, a stinging impression, a reflection of an impression.

I remember this well. I remember the sting of woodsmoke in the air, and the cool wetness of the evening. I remember smooth womb of darkness into which I hurled myself.

First to the New River Gorge, a wound in the earth. It feels like violation, or some mythic return, to have the walls - richwetgreenfallingtolight - of the gorge rise eight hundred feet above you, endless, to stump amidst the remains of towns long gone to lonely ruin and retaken by the land.

The towns there are small and inconstant, and they cling to the sides of the mountains like barely tolerated parasites. Route 60 is littered with diners that serve gooey grilled cheese and burgers and country fried steak on old, blue lined porceline plates.

Some even have names.

Some are marked merely by half-blown neon signs that burn unsteadily in the darkness and buzz an incandescent hum, like a bug zapper in a suburban back yard. They are anachronistic, they are open all night.

They always misspell night, and for some reason it does not seem an affectation. Coffee is always better there, a thick, black, bitter sludge leavened by rich cream. This is the only time you should put sugar in your coffee.

Most of the hotels catering to rafters in the area were closed for the season. They seemed lonely, empty places - with lightless eyes of windows. I listened to tinny voices on the AM radio, which whined from some enormous, fabulous distance that offered possibility.

I stayed in a chain hotel - Comfort Inn, or Motel 6 - I called a friend, and pretended I was at home. I went to the cowboy bar downstairs, and pretended I was French. I wrote a nonsense letter in French, and left it forlorn in the hotel room, with a tip for the maid.

I avoided the interstate - it seemed like an artery, opened, I wondered if I would, if I could, if I did -

I didn't think about it.

I refused to consider it. Yet.

I drove through towns smaller than my imagination, and considered settling there. Stopping. Moving in. I could be the tired, haunted waitress on the midnight shift at the truck stop, and during the day I would hide from the sun and write torrid, passionate poems that would peel flesh and muscle from bone in whomever would find them, a hundred years from now.

I was running out of money. I had left almost everything of myself at home. I had a journal and a car. I had panic rising in me like a bleak black wave.

I wondered how I could breathe.

How could I breathe, when every mile away seemed inevitable, and disaster was as real as, more likely than, whatever restart, reboot, reemergence I dreamt for myself in the few calming moments when my mind stilled to the speed of my car.

I stopped in White Sulpher Springs, but I did not stay in the Greenbrier. I rented a room in a nameless motel. I lied about my name.

During the day, I slept, or wandered into the hills. That night, I drank half a bottle of wine.

I was surprised that they sold it to me. I had never purchased alcohol before. I let someone else do it. I was afraid of being caught.

The wine was both bitter and sweet, like the rising gorge in my throat when I considered the possibilities. I awoke bruised and sour, and gobbled some greasy breakfast beside a trucker who wanted to paint me.

I still don't know if that was a euphemism for having sex.

Needless to stay, I fled.

I fled. I did not know where I was going, but it was still away. The sun was rising, or setting, or hidden behind a thick overcast sky. The light was slanted and watery.

I was seized with the irrational conviction that if I crossed the state line into Virginia, I would never, never return.

I drove. I drove. I drove, aching.

And then I turned around. The last exit before my self-envisioned oblivion, I turned around.