Chain hotel rooms are the greatest places in the world. If you use them properly.
You have to learn to lean into their powers. Accept a break from the Universe. Eat a biscuit, and boil a cup of tea. Take pleasure in a space where no-one cares if you exist.
Forget holidays abroad, or trips round beaches or stately homes. I booked weeks off in chain hotel rooms with no objective other than to stay between those four walls. The best ones were on the outskirts of small towns, some so locked within roads that no walking route existed to civilization at all.
And once the trek through the silent corridors of fireproof carpet was complete, and the door lock had declared its purpose with a short electric buzz, it was TV time.
To really escape, you have to explore the channels in the higher three figures. The foreign news channels, endless weather reports, packed religious sermons. All different enough from my own reality to form a perfect static.
For a while anyway. Sometimes towards the final hours of these trips the real world spilled through. I started to think of work commitments, bills to pay, and no amount of free ginger creams blocked these out.
So I had to keep going. Past the radio stations with their static logos, and in the house channel advertising room service. If you keep searching, you can find silence and nothing but a constant sky blue image. Some kind of holding station unique to hotels. This unbreaking calm soothed any fears of tomorrow. I could read a book, or sit my hands laced over my chest, eyes closed, and embrace oblivion.
In terms of what happened next, perhaps the new images would have appeared if anyone had searched this far. Maybe it was a reaction for watching nothingness for so long. But that unblinking sea on the box vanished, and something took its place.
Half a dozen of them in a line. Humanoid, but with red fur covering their body which even ran over where the eyes and mouth should have been. The one at the front had a spiked gold hat, the others golden sticks. These back five used their weapons to knock on the doors surrounding their procession. I recognised the fireproof carpet. The numbers on the numberplates getting higher with every entrance they passed. Closer to the one that adorned my room.
I tried to turn off the television, but the remote was lost under the bedsheets like sunken treasure.
Line: Take pleasure in a space where no-one cares if you exist.
