Lying in and about hotel beds alone in the dark.

Welcome, out of the cold. Our only guest. That's right, step right this way. Follow me closely please, our lights are low. Our guests are photosensitive. This suite here, thank you but no, we cannot accept gratuities. Enjoy staying with us.

The door closes with a reassuring click. The air pressure changes as the seal of a well mitred door frame with insulation cuts off all outside sound. The room is carpeted in a heavy shag so clean it seems a shame to walk on it in shoes.

Lying on top of the sheets in outdoor clothes in the dark.

Dreams come. A previously owned car. An underground parking garage with exhorbitant towing fees. A late night meal in the only open business. Light spilling from windows onto pavement. Familiar places well worn with memory and living.

No point going there. Nothing remains. The old ugly makes way for the new ugly.

Breaking glass. A long fall. A dream but not for some.

Wanting nights to last forever in silence and darkness and peace and absolute quiet.

Peeling off outdoor clothes and folding them neatly. A Hollywood shower. Full pajamas, a sleeping cap, night mask and security with sheets tucked under the feet and no extremities dangling over the edge.

A hot cheese sandwich would go right but it is too late to eat without risking very intense and vivid dreams that involve some terrible loss that cannot be consoled by living longer. This loss just leaches all the vitality and energy and pleasure away leaving remains that walk and talk and pay for hotel rooms.

Lying in the dark under the sheets with all devices on mute and the phone unplugged is the pleasure of anhedonia: being unreachable.

Not even talking to people who are not there but just spending time with them in silence. Old people sitting on benches and watching pigeons doing their mating dances in spring. Old people watching the pigeons and imagining the pigeons are people. Not random people but familiar and younger people. Some dead and some living. Total raunch if people did what pigeons do. Old men, usually men, watching.

Reading in bed until the pigeons fly away and take the invisible people with them. Filling the day in units and increments because ever moment is tolerable if you isolate it. Segment the moments into eternities where whatever is done is all that has ever been done. Lying there in the same position all night, maximally relaxed muscles, forehead and shoulders dropped. Teeth brushed and flossed and minty.

Neither awake nor asleep. Night.

The moon rises. Venus rises. They can be seen from the window appearing to cross from one block of flats to the other. They could be lovers leaping from one balcony to another except Venus is very small. A lady starving herself guiltless. The moon is fat. Indolent with redolence in splendiferousness.

Talking never works. Listening doesn't work either. There is always the asynchronicity and asymmetry between the two participants. Talking from B to A is not heard but talking from A to B is listened to. Meanwhile A doesn't know B is listening and B knows A is not.

So much for modern talking.

Friends are disappointing. Except when they are really smart or funny or dead or all three.
Family cannot be disappointing even when disappointment is what is called for. There are reasons for this but lying on the bed is more interesting than exploring the reasons beyond the idea that friends are themselves while family is closer than that.

Anxiety is boring, frustration is boring, tiredness, fatigue and exhaustion are boring. Especially when that exhaustion is mental and it's all mental. Even the physical debilitations that flesh is heir to. Like neurasthenia in the legs and arthritis in the thumb and heartburn from having eaten too late after all.

Even Shakespeare ended sentences with prepositions at least once. Meanwhile the sheets remain cool and the silence remains deep and the moon continues to rise and the hotel and the planet it rests on spins with an ever-so-slowly decelarating motion. No point in trying to arrive anywhere, just pass the time.

As the absence of bordom is surprise and age brings fewer surprises because of the commensurate knowledge that each experience grants and among those true novelties that do come, increasingly they are unwelcome as most of the pleasant ones have already been invoked, then the point seems to be that rather than trying to finish anything, trying to find a way to spend time in a way that has any completeness to it is the point to lying in and about hotel beds alone in the dark.