Hotel Rooms

Quite short. I wrote this a while ago. I'm not too sure about it, but I decided to post it, anyway.

Have you ever noticed the feeling of a hotel room?  Where you walk inside and the room feels cold, although the heat is on. You place your stuff down, knowing someone had done just this before you. You make your way to the bathroom, look in the mirror, and take a shower, thinking the whole time that countless people had been using the same room before you. You look down at the shower floor, hugging yourself tightly, trying to imagine a situation that had just passed. A man cheating on his wife, bringing a prostitute from downtown to the hotel, taking her into the room, and having a round or two of shower sex. A girl staying alone, curled up on the floor, letting the water hit her like a thunderstorm as she cries, trying to forget that no one loved her. A business man on a trip for work, trying to unwind from a long day, reminiscing on the days when he took long, passionate showers with the girl of his dreams; those days now over as he grew up, got a job, joined corporate America. 

You step out of the shower; feel the rush of cold air on your soaked skin. Take the towel that’s been washed millions of times after every use that could have been plain, normal purposes, or maybe something more perverse. You change, lie down on the large, too hard bed, and clutch a pillow in your arms. Think of the last people who had been just where you are now. The prostitute and the cheater who had moved from bed to shower; the woman laying there because the man had finished with her. As she lies there, she feels like a worthless piece of meat, an object for pleasure, but what else can she do for the money she desperately needs? The other lost, lonely girl, simply drifting through the wind, wrapped up in the floral blanket, but wishing it was the arms of someone else. She has run out of tears, all used up in the bath, but crying wouldn’t help ease the pain anyway, and knowing only one thing could help her, she reaches for the bottle of pills she left on the nightstand by the alarm clock and hotel phone. The monotone CEO from Wall Street, who never gets away anymore and forgets what true happiness felt like. He had a socialite wife he didn’t love, two private school kids, and memories of earlier days; the days where he made love with his first girlfriend, the one with the beautiful body, and together they would party, get high, forget their worries in a cloud of ecstasy.

You wake up in the hotel room; the ghosts of lives past had filled your dreams. You get up, you get dressed, and you go about your day in whatever new, exotic place you are visiting. You come back at night, and by now those thoughts of former guests have faded, but you know they’re still there. After your stay, however long it was, you take your last shower, sleep your last night, gather you belongings in the morning, and check out. No matter what you had done, be it something mundane, or maybe more unusual, you’ve added to the growing list of visitors. People who have never met, never will, but are still connected via the seemingly insignificant thing of an old hotel room.