(Pictured above: Sal?)
If you’ve stayed in a hotel alone before, you might have one, too. I’ll never meet my hotel husband in the conventional sense, but we shared one very real night together, a transient quilt of comfort connecting us across an impossibly thin, subtly papered wall.
I was undeniably sick that night – recovering from a rough case of viral gastroenteritis. If you don’t know what you might feel like after all of the liquid has been juiced out of your body (post-12-hour vom-fest), you basically always want to be crying or holding on to something heavy. Emotionally, I felt like I had undergone a process similar to the Grinch’s heart swelling at the end of How the Grinch Stole Christmas. However, since I like to think I had an average to below-average heart size to begin with, I gained less Christmas cheer and more a bad case of the weepies every time I turned on the news.
The night before, I had cried on the phone with my mom as she told me what she and my grandma ate for lunch. On the bus ride to the city, I cried almost immediately when Andrea Bocelli came on my Spotify, and I started up again when we passed by a graveyard and it made me think of all my dead ancestors. When I checked in at the hotel and they made me pay up front, I slid my card across the desk and whispered a soft goodbye as the dollar bills floated out the window behind me… and then I cried.
By nighttime, I was sitting in my questionably clean full-sized bed surrounded by Nilla wafers, pistachios, and two different iDevices, and I felt no less confused by my emotions or gravity. I fell into an unexpected nap at around 8pm, and a few hours later was surprised to find myself acutely awake and very afraid. There was an earsplitting, wet, soul-choking cough coming from the room next door, and in my delirium I became senselessly scared of the undoubtedly non-human creature that was stalking me from through the wall. Though you might assume the opposite, this hacking cough was actually much scarier to me than a spooky creak or howl traditionally associated with ghosts; it made me imagine some kind of chronically ill ghost, that would just slug over to me, dripping phlegm, with this hopeless, inconsolable look in its eyes. I could hurl tissues and Metamucil at it from my bed but it would keep moaning and crying and dripping on me until I forgot all of the happiness in the world.
It wasn’t for a few long minutes that I realized sad snot monster was probably an old man.
Normally after a realization like this I would be so incapacitated by my annoyance, yet not gutsy enough to actually do anything about it, that I’d just stand in front of the wall for like ten minutes and stare at it really angrily, reacting to every new cough with some combination of sarcastic facial expressions and sassy remarks. But on this particular night, my blood pressure was still hovering somewhere below 90/60, and my empathy levels were soaring past Bono on his way to Africa, so I sighed, and listened patiently to his wheezes. Then, Mucus Man let out a miserable, whimpering gulp/moan, and it so endeared him to me that when I cried, it was with a kind of joy – I imagined the life we would lead together, if the wall between us wasn’t there.
We would be a great couple, Sal and I. Did I mention his name is Sal? It’s Sal. I could see us walking through Central Park together, him violently coughing all the way, me whipping out a fresh tissue from my travel pack to meet his every sniffle. I imagine he has a pretty aggressive form of COPD, but he manages it well.
We would enter our favorite sleazy diner, and the hostess would say, “Oh you two!” and lead us to our favorite table. I would order Raisin Bran with a side of home fries and Sal would ask for the Special, but then I’d look at him all sternly and he’d add “with turkey bacon.”
Soon, all the people sitting at the tables around us would start giving us side-eye and mothers would cover their children’s faces. Sal’s uncontrollable wheezing and kerBLACHing was a public safety concern.
Though he’d try to contain it, Sal wouldn’t be able to catch all of his cough gusts in his elbow crotch, and some of the food passing by would catch the occasional spray. The waitress would come up to us quietly and pass us our food in a doggy bag. I would turn up my nose and say “We don’t need them anyway” and march out proudly with Sal in tow.
We’d go back to our nest of a hotel room and waste the afternoon away: me doing crossword puzzles, Sal coughing, wheezing, and helping me with the crossword answers I didn’t know. At bedtime, I’d rub his withering chest down with Vicks, and the gentle vibrations from his heaving mucus from the depths of his crumpling lungs would lull me into a rosy sleep.
It may not have been a perfect future to imagine, but the thought of Sal beside me in that clinical hotel room that night made me feel less like a malnourished army of one. It also made me consider that I might just be inordinately excited to be an old person, and I should start to think about why that might be. But for the most part, I felt grounded, and with every cough from the room next door, I became just a little less weepy inside.
So here’s to you, phlegmy Sal – let’s raise children together!
Image via.