Christian’s Reviews > Hotel > Status Update

Men are so content to be helpless. My husband can't operate the coffee machine, my father cannot cook a meal, has no idea what goes into the food he likes. They are content not to know the most basic ways of servicing their bodies.

Since I left home, I've been a hotel ghost, living on chocolates, coffee, dregs of champagne and candle ends. There's no longer such a thing as lunch, or dinner, only a series of atomized teatimes and cocktail hours, tiny meals. . .

I have lived in relation to desires, often other people's. It is easy to slot desire in. There is a hole in my side into which someone else's desires fit.

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.

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?