You’re only staying for the night. Maybe two. It’s a temporary space to call your own, a place to sleep while on the road. The exact opposite of a home, trading the personal for the expedient, the familiar for the opportune. And in transience, there is freedom.
Maybe it’s a romantic engagement that couldn’t happen anywhere else, whether for reasons serendipitous or salacious. The hotel hookup: a classic trope, made possible by the leading institution of transitory relationships, often lost in translation, but always unforgettable.
The elevator is a quintessential part of the package. A temporary vessel in a temporary space. The same dimensions as a confessional, ripe for accusations as well as admissions. You have time for a few words before moving on, or none at all. Here you can catch a lift and a chance encounter. Start something new with a stranger. It’s an enclosure suited for life-changing moments in less than a minute.
But it’s not all hope and love and discovery. There is evil here as well. Doors to places you’d rather not go, holding behind them things you’d rather not know. Whether it’s one hundred floors of frights or just the room where it happens, the hotel is a keeper of memories—not all of them your own. And like a bad dream, sometimes it’s the only place you can face the unspeakable.
The hotel, with its endless rooms, secret-keeping doors, and intimate compartment carrying you between it all, is built on an architecture of liminality. Constructed from a collection of thresholds, established as a crossroads for travelers, a transition point for personal journeys. You’re only here for the night, but who could you become by the time you check out?
I love how this read like poetry. It reminded me of the Cecil Hotel here in Los Angeles—its proximity to Skid Row and the role it plays as semi-permanent housing to the houseless population there, and its reputation for violence, suicide, doors "holding behind them things you'd rather not know." The Vanishing at the Cecil Hotel documentary on Netflix covers a lot of its history. I love the exploration of how events that transpire can assign narrative meaning to a place, and how that place can assign new meaning to us in turn.