WHO YOU ARE IN A HOTEL BATHROOM
STIMULANT WEEKLY NEWSLETTER 004 // JUNE 22, 2024
Charlie Zacks says that being in your 20s is maybe all about leaving places, and returning again. I tend to agree.
This feeling is especially strong in summer.
Suddenly, everyone scatters to far corners of the continent and even the earth. Without school the center falls away so quickly—many of our lives are untethered from Montreal in an instant, and we are called again to whatever we are missing for eight months of the year. For me, it is always my family. All year, my little brother has been sleeping in a bedroom in Victoria, BC— I feel the constant pull to be making breakfast in our kitchen when he wakes up for as many mornings as possible before he doesn’t live here anymore. Meanwhile, my roommates are off in Italy and Germany and Denver and Toronto, myself to New Hampshire for a weekend and the West Coast again. All of us are elastically connected over the continent and the world, held at a comfortable distance because we know we will return again to the apartment and fill the living room window with light again and the leaving will be over, for a time. The distance is comfortable because it has a beginning and end—the going is certain but so is the returning, so the weeks pass and we leave out some of the updates because we will be back soon to tell them.
In “On the Road,” Kerouac’s narrator finds himself in a constant cycle of coming and going. This is not a summer routine but the very pattern of his life. At the center of it all is not a university or a shared apartment but his enigmatic friend Dean Moriarty. The novel is punctuated with him settling down and uprooting again, finding a job as a prison guard or picking grapes in New Mexico. After a short time somewhere he announces that he must be on the road again, and whichever woman he has shacked up with nods in silent understanding and he returns to Moriarty and hitchhiking and hopping train cars. There is always some other place to see or life he must live with his gang of friends. When he needs a break he lives with his aunt for a while. Years pass where he works and talks to no one and goes nowhere, but the road always exists as a possibility, a promise.
I think about that intoxicating feeling often, of waking up in a bed and a town that is not your own. The quiet of the morning in a strange house is thicker than usual. It covers you in a more forceful kind of peace. The room seems more silent than usual because you are listening harder then ever, adjusting to the new sounds of the new street or the eerie lack thereof. Everything is louder and more pressing because it is different, and it jolts you into contemplation, into noticing. When your surroundings are familiar, you can begin to blend into them—among the furnishings of my apartment I melt right into the background, into the texture of my life there. But in a new place I feel that stark sense of contrast, like when you stand on a bluff and are buffeted by wind on all sides. The weather makes you feel every outside surface of your own skin and you are suddenly aware of all the edges where your body is different than the world around it. This slightly uncomfortable sense of self-ness reminds you that you are just a person and a free one at that. It is beautiful and strange and meditative and fleeting. Kerouac describes exactly this when he finds himself in Des Moines:
I woke up as the sun was reddening; and that was the one distinct time in my life, the strangest moment of all, when I didn’t know who I was – I was far away from home, haunted and tired with travel, in a cheap hotel room I’d never seen, hearing the hiss of steam outside, and the creak of the old wood of the hotel, and footsteps upstairs, and all the sad sounds, and I looked at the cracked high ceiling and really didn’t know who I was for about fifteen strange seconds. I wasn’t scared; I was just somebody else, some stranger, and my whole life was a haunted life, the life of a ghost. I was halfway across America, at the dividing line between the East of my youth and the West of my future.
On these mornings you find yourself alone, without the people that make your life what it is, or the things that remind you of your past and future, and you realize you must define yourself anew. You screw your eyes closed against the dawn and try to remember. It is harder without the surroundings, the physical reminders of who you are or once were. There is no seat at a dining table to remind you that you are someone’s daughter. Maybe, once you place your books on a desk and see the annotations inside, you might realize you were someone’s lover once. This memory could shame you into donning a larger t-shirt, or make you arch your back a little more when you walk and put perfume on the inner corners of your elbows. What you remember and forget will move you differently. You must perform this negotiation of the self for as long as you are away from everything that sticks you back down to who you were before. Everything is relational, and this is the hope and the fear of coming and going, that new circumstance could whittle you down to a different sort of person. You are somebody else, your life planned and set in motion by a ghost that does not live in your hotel room but whose lipstick is on the counter.
And it is, of course, tremendously uncomfortable. Right now you leave on vacation or for an internship but you hit the road with a return address. You get to try on the feeling of leaving. When your roommates return with a new heartbreak or a haircut it is exciting, not a marker of lost time or new priorities. The shifts are exciting and temporary because they could be easily reneged, overwritten by familiar patterns. But there is a deeper pang: Summer reveals how tenuous our time together is, because one year we will go and not return, at least not in the same way. The hotel room will be a new life and we will not marvel at the finite strangeness but hang postcards on the walls and try to make it ours. Perhaps the mystery of who we could become will be too scary, and we will import everything we can of our old lives, unpack it all, lie in bed each morning for a time and whisper the story of who we are and how we got here. Perhaps we will take nothing and remember nothing and each day be remade by the new cues of the new world. After you leave home for the first time you eventually realize that you are no longer planted anywhere, that you must now choose where to stake your life and that stake is not an ancestral home but a yearlong lease at most. Nothing is left for you to inherit and the choices are not certain or made for you anymore. The sheer vacuous space of the world is a good enough reason to never find yourself in the same place twice.
Going is never as lonely as you imagine. Kerouac always finds new people to surround himself with that affirm and correspond to whatever he is preoccupied with at the moment. All that matters is they have the same lust for life, the same curiosity about what the world holds for people who feel its pull like he does. And this is what we all have done too. My friends and I have each found our way to Montreal, and it is here that we have created the lives we have now. And this gives me some peace: One day I will have different hopes and plans and dreams and I will find more people to share that with. For Kerouac, it was good old American lust for life; for me it will be a different but equally magnetic force of attraction. It has worked before and it will work again.
The goodbyes are still impossible. The only real solace is that sometimes The Change is made for you, when you cannot help it. The things you were sad to leave might not even exist for you anymore. You come home because you miss the place where you grew up until you stand in your bedroom, too small for your grown-up body. You realize the home you crave does not exist anymore because you are not the you that lived there. You see the overgrown lawn and everything is different. That boy does not live in his old apartment anymore and neither does your love for him. It is somewhere, ghostly, in the past. What and who you want might not exist for you anymore. You will not revive it by staying. So you must leave, anyhow.
[that summer feeling, Johnathan richman— do you long for her, or for the way that you were?]
This pattern is present in my own history. My father moved to Paris when he was fifteen, then to Montreal with some friends from his old job. He worked his way around Canada, to Newfoundland and across the prairies, and landed in Vancouver. This is where he met my mother, and where they began their life together. She says that it was perfect— he worked for a hotel and she at a hospital. They got dinner with friends and went dancing on the weekends. They travelled to China once, and planned to move there, but something with their visas didn’t work out. Then she says that after a while, their lives changed without them even noticing. They loved the city but they hadn’t been dancing for months. Everyone else, too, had hunkered down and gotten a kid or a dog or a consuming hobby. My parents found they wanted a house and a garden and me. There are many ways a life can look, but this is it most of the time. Your twenties are about coming and going, the great love and pain and drama of independence, a life lived on curiosity and lust for adventure and whims and opportunities. Then one day it becomes about temporary vacations from the routine you have made for yourself. All the shifts become much less dramatic, part of a larger history of change. It happens in smaller increments, one child or friend or job or country at a time, and by that point you are used to the fear and gut-wrench. You have practiced every summer for your entire life. All of it is much less immediate and threatening. At least this is how I imagine it.
Kerouac talks about this too, how the chaos of youth is smoothed over by time, how everything seems settled and static and well-preserved in photographs by the time we inherit it.
I realized these were all the snapshots which our children would look at someday with wonder, thinking their parents had lived smooth, well-ordered lives and got up in the morning to walk proudly on the sidewalks of life, never dreaming the raggedy madness and riot of our actual lives, our actual night, the hell of it, the senseless emptiness.
Part of the fear comes from forgetting that our parents woke up lost for many mornings too. We are in the thick of it now, the unmoored years where nothing is certain and you must consider who you are in a hotel bathroom, or whenever you have the chance. One day things will settle, almost imperceptibly, and it will not be this way anymore. But everything will be better for having lived our actual raggedy senseless lives for a while. To have seen that other coastline and know the people living on it and what they are living for.
What is that feeling when you're driving away from people and they recede on the plain till you see their specks dispersing? – it's the too-huge world vaulting us, and it's good-bye.
GIF from Lost in Translation.
Who You Are… was edited by Jack Schaaf and Charlie Zacks.
get hip
Buy a copy of Dialogues on CoreCore & the Contemporary Online Avant-Garde by 0nty & Smith featuring work from Wonderful Cringe (Nicholas Sanchez) and Dana Dawud (DansDansRev), friends of the publication and lovers of the world.
Two different launch parties for two different Montréal literary publications:
Seth Gover’s recording of a song written by the late Michael Ray Hall.
Yolk Literary’s “Writing Atelier: New Approaches” at Librairie Pulp Books & Café (Montréal) on June 27, 2024.
Please support, if you can, families in Gaza by helping to get their voices heard and hopefully experience some amount of security. Here is a link to a spreadsheet from Operation Olive Branch which lists several ways you can support Palestinian families and individuals financially or otherwise.