On Hotel Rooms and Temporary Intimacy
DETAILS
When — May 2025
Category — Contemplations
Reading Time — 2 minutes
On Hotel Rooms and Temporary Intimacy
I’ve developed a strange relationship with hotel rooms over the years. These transient spaces – designed specifically to erase evidence of previous occupants – have become oddly familiar territory.
I can read them instantly. The Ritz-Carlton’s subtle beige palette and precise 90-degree angles. The W’s calculated edginess with its too-dim lighting. The boutique hotel’s desperate attempts at personality with local artwork and quirky furniture. Each carries its own atmosphere, its own unspoken expectations.
There’s something liminal about these spaces – existing outside normal time and place. The housekeeping service resets the stage daily, erasing whatever narrative played out the night before. Clean sheets, replenished toiletries, glasses returned to their paper wrappings. The eternal present tense.
Perhaps that’s why such unexpected honesty emerges in hotel rooms. We’re suspended between realities – removed from daily constraints yet not quite on vacation. The usual rules feel somehow distant. With no past or future in these anonymous rooms, the present moment expands to fill the space.
I’ve witnessed countless versions of this phenomenon. The confessions emerge more easily against generic artwork and standardized furniture. As if the room’s deliberate impersonality creates space for authentic personality to emerge.
I’ve started noticing my own hotel room habits. How I immediately move the extra pillows to the closet. How I arrange my personal items in a specific order on the bathroom counter – creating tiny territories of familiarity in unfamiliar settings. Small rituals of temporary belonging.
Sometimes I wonder about the other temporary intimacies these rooms have witnessed. The celebrations, disappointments, revelations, and reconciliations absorbed by these walls. The secrets confessed at 2 AM that will never be repeated. The thousands of stories overlaid in the same physical space like transparent pages in a strange collective novel no one will ever read.
I find beauty in this impermanence. The knowledge that whatever occurs between these walls – however meaningful, however profound – will be gone tomorrow, existing only in memory. There’s freedom in that ephemerality. The chance to exist fully in a moment without concern for its permanence.
Perhaps that’s the most valuable skill I’ve developed – the ability to create genuine connection within temporary contexts. To find meaning not despite transience, but within it.
Until next time,
Alessandra