Enjoy Your Stay

Holy shit-sticks. I just finished A Farewell to Arms. It's easily one of the most well written novels I've ever read. Somehow, and I blame the public school system for this, I managed to live 29 years without reading it. Hemingway, by contrast, was 29 when he wrote it. Go figure. I've been told his short stories are even better. He writes simply, and this discouraged me while reading The Old Man and the Sea. It was boring, almost infantile. This story though, was something else. After I finished it I read through the 30+ alternate endings he left on the floor. The one he settled on is good, and I enjoyed it enough, but there were others just as good:

"In the end it is better not even to remember things but I know that.

That was all gone now, the sunlight and the spring and

Nothing was gone."

Listing the others could potentially spoil the details of the ending for you, so I won't. But god damn is he good.

All day long I was terribly depressed. My only desire was to leave work and go home. I imagined lying in bed and staring at my ceiling, at its subtleties and irregular texture. I would look at it so long it would become meaningless. Until the sun set I would remain still and stare. All I wanted was to do nothing. To be driftwood on a motionless ocean of apathy. I thought maybe it was the drugs, but maybe it was something else. Someone asked me how I was doing.

Aching, I told her.

If you're sick you should go home, she said.

No, I said, it's a different kind of aching. She doesn't say anything. She just looks at me, sad.

It's okay, I say, it'll pass, though it feels like it won't.

We are hotels where wandering feelings come in to spend the night. With wet feet they walk through carpeted halls, following a bellboy past locked door after locked door, until, finally, arriving at an empty suite at the end of a long corridor, they take up temporary residence in our hearts. They watch television late into the night and shower too early. The door slams noisily whenever they are coming or going and their voices are always too loud. No matter what, we always have vacancies and the concierge is terrifically accommodating. I don't know what's worse, the rooms that are empty, or the ones that are full.