Breath of the Walls

Contributed by Douglas Noble on 31/05/08

Hotels are dead spaces, built in the angles between hello and goodbye. Identities are boiled down into names, faces blur and blend. A steady stream of bodies that we’ve leaned to forget. Our life is contained in endlessly forgetting.

The wet crescent of an abandoned towel, the sagging faces hidden in unmade sheets, a wardrobe slightly ajar: they constitute the secret signatures here. The room bulges, twists, in order to accommodate the occupants. A wet footprint by the bathroom door, the swoop of a handprint through he condensation on the mirror’s face.

These are the actions by which we trace the passage of humanity. The moments where bodies impact with our world. We tense, and we treasure. Soon enough the others come: the flickering, moving ones. And they are gone.

Actions undone. The room is clean, reset to a default position. We wait, now.