Hotel Room

Not those dingy ones you take up once you have suddenly eloped because there was no other way for love, but that. But those ones to which you have to come back to, once every night. When you're travelling alone, and for work. Alien city. That same elevator to the thirteenth floor. Clean white sheets, the faceless housekeeper. Who turns your pillow cases inside out once in a while, places neat sachets of shampoo in the bathroom, packets of sugar on the coffee table. You wonder if she's a woman or a man. Because she is the only human contact you have had in days. Is he a pedophile, does he touch your underwear that you might have left out to dry. Each night, after you get back within an exhausted body but your mind is sleepless, you wonder if the view of a sleepy city going to stand you any company at all.

Whenever I told Him that I was a loner by default, how I felt lonely no matter where I was, whatever I was upto, there was always this shallow meaningless void in my head that no one could fill. He would quietly absorb my metaphysical unstoppable three minute of a lecture and then retort, softy with a remark. That in that hotel room is the loneliest you could be. And that I wouldn't be able to realize how completely abandoned he had felt each of those nights across those months and months he had hopped among a multitude of such rooms. 

I was not a fool. I knew. Sometimes I was relieved that the man wouldn't in the very least, take my being with him for granted that he knew how absolutely painful loneliness could get. But did that work for me? Not, I guess.

I would often imagine him. Loitering around on those tiled floors. Taking short quick steps to the closet, or leaving his shirt and tie on the bed before he went in to take a shower. Adjusting the temperature of the water according to the place he was in. Too hot, hot, lukewarm. Hot showers did well for mild insomnia, he would say. Or just picking up the work on your laptop where you had left it at in office, helped too. Sometimes logging on to Skype, seeing his mother would work. Or calling me.