Hotel//Alpine
A fork that lies at the mouth of sleep, yawning wide and obtuse like the wide and gentle slopes of a black river delta. No coin to pass, no boat to carry me. Cold water runs up around my fingertips, about my ears. Sleep never comes easily anymore, but only as a slow inexorable sinking into exhaustion, like sliding beneath the surface of a dark placid water. Our eyes weren’t meant to see this much artificial light. When I close them every day I can see burned circles, a field of orange and bright red floating in the center of the blackness, repeling the slow lapping of the river’s edge. But when my internal sunlight has faded and the light sinks below the water I drift.
A fork at that mouth of the river sleep. And it carries me toward something I still have yet to fully understand:
To one side--- a beautiful structure, though I can’t say I’ve ever truly spent time in the dream gazing at it from the outside- one could almost imagine it as a castle or perhaps The Stanley Hotel will do your imagination better justice in sharing this vision. I’m not sure I can even say I’ve been outside of it, for I always wake up within it and find myself wandering its curling and unending halls. It puts the House on Ash Tree Lane to shame, that’s for sure. Non-euclidean and impossible to navigate, but in every instance possible nonetheless. I know I’m always returning to the same hotel, to the Stanley, to that Hotel of Leaves, but each dream there remains distinct. New rooms. Different faces. An aggregation of so many hotels and places that I have been, sort of just Rube Goldberg’d and made into a Frankenstein of a place. I know that she’s waiting there at the top of a balustrade somewhere, for we met there once and what we talked about I can’t recall, but I have yet to return. I know that you’re running through its halls, because sometimes i hear your laughter echoing through them. And the hotel itself is an echo, in a way. Each dream an echo of another, each incarnation of The Hotel similar but not precisely. It is a cog of memory. It is, itself, a kind of staging ground. Each time I return I try to explore it further. To find who else it holds, what other memories and faces I can return to. A haunted tesseract. But in many ways, memory is nothing but the trace that remains when we are haunted.
To the other side--- a dazzling taiga. I am seated atop a tall pine tree that towers above snow-covered hills, nestled in a glacier-carved valley. I’ve seen this valley before, once. But never from this angle. I can’t move, and though I strain my eyes there is nothing to see. There is nothing here but the endless white.
