Ode to motel rooms

Motel rooms are oddly calming. You run around all day, packing your bags, checking and re-checking your checklist (that you almost definitely left at least 2 things off) navigating roads and emotions and hallways until it finally happens. You walk into a room that you have probably never seen before, and you may never see again, but it's familiar. It is clean. Still. Everything is exactly where it belongs, lined up in neat, even lines. It invites you to come in for a night or two, but never to stay. It will leave you alone, in silence while you unpack your bags and thoughts and realize just what it is you have gotten yourself into.

It has a bathroom where you can take a deep breath and tell yourself that everything will work out, as you splash your weary face with cleansing water. It has a TV to take you away from the world for a while and let you think you are back home on your couch just doing your usual thing. It has a bed or two that are too tightly made to be welcoming. Go ahead, lie down a while. Stare at the ceiling and pray for sleep. Motel rooms aren't magic though. They can't bring quiet to a moving mind but they can give it a quiet place to move.

The walls could be anywhere. If it helps, you can tell yourself you are still in the town you left. You can tell yourself you are headed back instead of away. Motel rooms, like blank pages, lend themselves to any story you want to give them. It's not until you leave in the morning that you have to face the fact that change is inevitable and you are being swept away.

So here's to quiet rooms. To time to think. To time to forget you have a 3:00AM wake-up call. To change. Here's to the future, and to all the motel rooms I will probably stay in, collect my thoughts in, and reassess my life in. Here's to life.