love, read, write

the lights of this hotel room are dim. i feel surveilled under the strange fixtures on the ceiling, which likely serve a functional and necessary purpose, but to me, look like eyes. i am being watched. i am watching youtube, it is my last day in australia, i had promised myself not to go on social media during my vacation, yet here i am. in a strange hotel. watching a video, because watching other people's lives through a screen has become a habit that feels like home.

she looks lonely, i think to myself. through the screen i can see a beautiful person asking earnest questions, seeking a deeper meaning inside of a twenty minute actor interview. it seems that she is searching for an answer so desperately she is doing it in front of a camera. i don't care what the truth is (if maybe all of this might be an inauthentic performance). i decide to believe it. 

i realize, then, that something i am deeply afraid of is exactly that. that people will see me, searching for answers in others, and they will say, she looks lonely. that i don't realize how naked i am, how obviously i am living myself into the world. the sun shines too brightly.

in the taxi ride to the hotel, earlier in the day, i looked outside, and i thought to myself, this is a great place to die. i could do it in the hotel room today. it is beautiful weather here. i am far from everyone. people are living their happy lives around me, and i could die, and nobody here would mind. and then i would evaporate into the heat, up into the sun. thousands of miles away, nobody would notice. my shame would go buried with me, underground, and the rest of me – the part with the memories – would be between the clouds. they would rain down in a different form– a happy, bouncing symphony off a little boy's umbrella.