I get it

Last night I looked up the distance between Kenner and Chattanooga. More specifically, the Red Roof Inn in Lookout Mountain. Eight hours. Eight and a half, roughly, if you figure bathroom/gas breaks.

If it were a pay weekend, if I could call into work, if I were so inclined, I could get in my car and go. Just drive. Drive until the mountains rose out of the ground and I reached that goddamn Red Roof Inn. I’ve written about that place before. It was just a seedy motel on a service road, right alongside of the highway, sandwiched between a Waffle House and a Cracker Barrel. There was nothing special about it unless you count the fact that Sid stayed in the same hotel with his family as a child (a fact that he didn’t remember until we got there after the fire) and the strange coincidence that Holly & Cody had once stayed there as well.

The room was a carbon copy of every cheap hotel I’ve been in before-two double beds, table in the corner next to those awesome shit ass motel ACs that keep your room icy as fuck all night long in a way that a $400/night room at a major hotel won’t do. Tiny bathroom that you can barely turn around in. Sticky comforters, designed circa 1983, that reek of bleach and plastic. A sickly yellow light over a mirror that always makes you makes you look jaundiced, no matter how much makeup you put on, a feeling of cheapness no matter how dolled up you are. Dirty sex. Plastic ice bucket. The best sleep you ever had.

But that hotel also felt like a place where people sit alone and think about how far away they are from what they know. People never go there to stay; it’s always on the way to somewhere else. The lights in the parking lot crackle all night long and the Waffle House keeps serving the same limp old eggs and bacon and even at 3AM people are mowing down that highway, anxious to be somewhere else. Truck drivers, families avoiding vacation traffic, lonely men and women, murderers and rapists and god knows who else. There's a feeling that there are countless lives unrolling themselves next to you and yours is moldering in a closet next to the bulky safe and the mini ironing board. Stand out there long enough and you begin to believe you’re in a strange vacuum, where no moment differs from the next day, the next month, the next year. A transitory, pre-packaged life. After cleaning the hotel room for the next person, all the memories are Windexed, bleached, Pine-sole'd away. When I stayed there (both times) I was at a crossroads in my life; I felt haunted. Hunted. Both?

Even if I found myself there nine hours from now, I wouldn’t even stay in a room. I know my limits and that’s bungee jumping over them. I can’t imagine walking into one of those shitty little rooms and sitting on that bed and thinking what I’d think. Hearing the quiet collapse around me. The utter nothing. I think I'd be moved to something ugly, something permanent, a thought I haven't allowed myself in a long time. I am a girl with roots; I do not have a transitory life, no matter how much I sometimes want to run away from the one I have. I wouldn't belong there, and I don't want to be stupid and make a mess for someone else to clean up. I don't want to be the reason why someone can't sleep at night.

But I would drive nine long hours to stand in that parking lot. Because when you’re in a place like that, it always tells you where your heart is.

I’m so tired of trying to figure it out.