Closure

Today the hotel we are staying in closes for the season. There is an air of giddiness among the staff, coffee refill requests are cheerfully ignored, the unimaginative flirtatious comments of 50-year-old German men are met with no indulgent smiles from the young Polish waitresses, just an impatient blankness, a concentrated look as though willing them to disappear already.

Instead of the sounds of languor and leisure—book pages lazily flipped, hikes embarked upon, drinks ordered on the patio—it is all industry and closure. Suitcases snapping shut, vacuum cleaners whining, the mournful scrape of luggage across gravel, resisting departure as much as its owners.

There is a satisfaction to everything ending with the close of your own vacation; there isn’t the agonizing glance back as the car pulls away, watching it all continue without you, seeing newcomers check in as you check out, the smug assurance of six more days of vacation on their faces. But there is also something wrenching about the finality of the hotel closing shop, a swelling surrender to winter, like the too-loud final bars of a symphony. At midnight the clocks changed, too.

Early this morning, I dreamt of an infinitely old man standing near the brink of a long dropoff, his back to the edge. He had placed his cane perilously close to the edge, and I yelled to him to be careful. He successfully picked the cane up again, I breathed a sigh of relief, and then he simply walked backwards, off the cliff, into thin air. It was the funniest thing I’d ever seen.