Ultimately a hotel room is not a home. It’s a temporary arrangement, a modern avatar for the age old inn, a place to keep your bags and rest, until it is time to hit the road again. Now where you go from there depends on many factors. It depends on the path that you are on, what is your mission, what is your purpose, what is your destination.
Sometimes the destination is uncertain. Just like life is. Who knows where life will take us, we say, as we just wait and watch our world turn into a lopsided dream all around us. But a room with a bed in a tavern or a homestay or an Airbnb or at an actual hotel or at a barn is a good respite from the travails of movement. If comfortable it can even be rejuvenating and if not then it can add to your troubles.
In any case it is a pause button which we all need, now and then. To reflect and ponder or to rest and rejuvenate. Some of the rooms inhibit your thirst for exploration and make you want to stay ensconced in their cosy comforts. Some others are optimal for rest and you can’t stand the thought of spending an entire day inside them. I am always caught between the two. But given a choice I always go for the latter. After all, the magic is outside.
Hotel rooms also hold memories. In a way they are strange public but private spaces. Or private public spaces? Intimate moments are shared in hotel rooms and they are silent witnesses to a quarrel and a spat and a passionate torrid affair the next. They know our secrets which we so cleverly hide. They know the secret dealings behind closed doors and they watch in silence as lonely souls weep.
Those who look after these rooms don’t seem to care for them, the way travellers do. Even though they move with their cleaning and maintenance in a careful but disengaged manner. Changing the sheets bring them no joy, or sweeping the dirty floor or picking up the discarded evidence of secret rendezvous from the dustbins doesn’t bring them any satisfaction. It’s just a job. And when they are well paid or heavily incentivized they do a good job.
A hotel room will always remain fascinating to me. And I always stay in all the rooms with equal wonder and curiosity. But no matter how much I pry, I can never get them to reveal the secrets of the previous occupants. It’s as if they are in connivance with those who maintain them, the rooms and the staff. The silent holders of truth and secrets of the guests who pass through here. And in the process they learn about me, even though they remain tight lipped about their own history. Like a good ai model.
But once the stay is over and I have checked out and settled all the bills, the road beckons and one trudges along with memories left behind, locked forever in that one hotel room to which one may never ever return again.