Status Updates From Hotel (Object Lessons)

The more I wriggle toward divorce the more painful I know it will be, the closer I get to the blank pain I felt yesterday when I realized I had persuaded you to leave, calm panic with no prospect of an end. . . . How much of you, even absent, there is from which to defend myself.

Who am I for? That's the question I kept asking. If I'm not for you, who am I for? I knew I shouldn't want to be for someone: I should be living for art, perhaps. I should be living for myself, or whatever, and yes, I tried to desire these abstracts.

The one thing I learn in the clinic: If I express a desire aloud, I immediately think someone will stop me.

A ghost erases the present by repeating the actions of the past. That's what haunting is. Was this what I wanted from hotels—to be haunted?

“Now that I am no longer with you, I no longer have the kind of loneliness in which to wait for you”