optimist in a broken submarine

Unbelievably, it's raining. I leave my bedroom window open just enough for my cat to come in and out. Sometime past midnight I felt him curl up next to me, his fur wet and cold. I thought I was dreaming, but woke later and realized different. Steadily, softly, it's been raining all day. The grey is pervasive. A rainy grey June day. Our world and weather are changing.

My son leaves for New Mexico on the 13th and we are still aiming to close on the house business by the 15th. We have a fantastic loan agent working for us, but there are several balls still in the air. The only person who can release an important document is out sick, and we're waiting to hear back from two other people on other stuff before we can go forward. It's all nerve wracking and stressful, Patti and Karl's new house deal contingent on this one being done by the 15th. I've been living with uncertainty regarding the house for more than a year. It's all now down to the wire, and that wire feels quite abit like a garrote. The house is thick with tension. Even the spirits are jittery.

As soon as my son flies out on Monday, I'm checking into a hotel. I used the internet to get a good deal for a nice room in an entirely different neighborhood. I'm staying there next week. For some reason, this is alarming and upsetting people close to me. I've had two offers of other houses I could stay at. Three, if you count my ex's insistence that I stay at her house while her new girlfriend and she are in Yosemite. She's worried I'll be too depressed in a hotel. Imagine an indredulous look on my face. And one of those laughs that is the sound of frozen tears shattering.

I need to be away from other people's stuff. Literally. At both my office and at home I'm surrounded by boxes, people's stuff in transition. I work with the stuff of people's inner lives, their stories, their emotions. The human drama in my inner circle is the stuff that television rating wars are made of. I need a break, an intermission.

Hotel rooms are a place between the worlds. Every night is a new vignette of human drama, but each day they start anew, devoid of individual personality, all evidence of the story removed, cleansed and purified. I long for the emptiness, the blank slate of the closet, the bedside table , the chest of drawers. The sanitary wrapper around the drinking glass awaits me, I'll savor the moment of breaking it. The clean bland whiteness of the towels, the sheets, the pillowcases, oh that feels so restful! At a hotel, I'm free to be passing thru, a tourist, a weary travelor. I can be quiet or I can strike up a conversation in the hotel bar, taking on another identity completely. Maybe I'll be a seminar leader on increasing sales performance, or a romance writer doing research for a story set during the gold rush. I long for this place between the worlds, an interlude in the action of my amazing and wondrous life. I can for a brief time be simply a visitor to this world. My bag is packed.