life in transition

homesick.

What ever happened to hotels?

When did they become these clinical environments with sickening fluorescent lighting? Ugly, energy-saving lights permanently lit in the hallways and the lobby, with a nightwatch at the desk and security cameras, because heaven-forbid a patron steals or vandalizes the establishment. Hotels, unless on the more expensive end of the spectrum, have become so ugly and unwelcoming.

I feel sick and awful, withering and dried up almost like an under-watered houseplant. All I want to do is take a walk through the hotel to find dim lights, to find a comfy lobby chair, to not have my every step cataloged by a security system. But I can’t. And walking outside the hotel is virtually impossible too, sitting cozily next to a major highway.

I’ve been sleeping in a hotel bed on linen hundreds of people have probably slept with before, and musty, over-stuffed pillows. I’ve been watching shitty cable television, half the channels I usually enjoy being in Spanish I can scarcely understand. I’ve been away from home for nearly a week, from the one thing that relieves me stress: horses. I just want out. But I can’t.

There’s two more nights of using scratchy towels that smell of bleach, and shampoo from a travel bottle under over-chlorinated water. There’s two more days of biding my time until I can cram myself onto an airplane seat and fly home. Two more days of bartering with senile grandparents who never have anything positive to say about anything, who I know won’t be around much longer - but all the more reason why they shouldn’t be fucking miserable.

While I’m here, my friends have been wanting me to solve their problems, and be their rock. They want me to offer up advice and make them feel better, because apparently I’m entirely immune. And I want to help, I really do, because these are people I truly care about. I’ve been trying so hard to help them. But I feel like I’m banging my damn head against a wall because they keep swimming around their issues like hungry sharks trying to resist their prey. A nibble, repentance, another nibble.

There’s only so much support I can offer to people before I run dry. I’ve been emotionally drained, scorched out like a raisin. The florida warmth is dehydrating me, the souless washed-out stucco of these awful buildings under the burnt palmettos is sickening. Everything is brown or pastel, like the very life has been sucked clean out of it.

I want to go home.