Creative Nonfiction by nyoka eden
I’m working the front desk alone at the Holiday Inn Express. It’s Christmas day, the hotel is practically vacant so I am permitting myself to fill it with versions of me on every floor, in every room, while I am down here front and center like Willem Dafoe fucking Charlotte Gainsbourg in front of the World Tree, pale and nameless limbs desperately reaching from beneath its roots in Lars von Trier’s Antichrist, the film I recommend most and am watching in Room 302 as a Christmas gift to myself. I am sitting on my hands during the infamous self-mutilation scene when she takes a pair of shears and cuts off her own — — Front desk how may I help you? It’s me from 119 calling to ask me for a wake-up call, the same me who said here on business when I arrived, even though I didn’t ask. I asked what do I do and learned I was not at all at liberty to say.
I am delivering new sheets, as I requested, to my suite on the top floor. I knock on the door until I see my blackened eye, still wet from tears, peeking out at me. Once I realize I am not who I was afraid I would be, I open the door just enough to take the sheets from my hands and just enough to see that I am tinsel-thin, my arms a hailstorm. I am choosing to be this lonely in the thick of Christmas, and so am I. Because wherever I appear in this hotel, in this life, it is because I have placed me there. Right? And, whoever?
Back at the front desk, racking up my tab in sweets from the hotel pantry passing time. Across the hall, making myself an iconic picture of sad beauty shooting up in cyan light. Counting down the hours on my fingertips until I’m finally off the clock. Releasing myself from reality through the eye of a needle.
Do you see me at the coffee station, look down at me when I pour it straight black as a group of me breezes right by me in the lobby dressed barely for a night out, and I think Which one is a good daughter. Which one is good at all. Which is awfully famous, which is long dead, is, in short, a liar.
The truth about Christmas is I am wearing my grandmother’s scarf. I cannot say I borrowed it because now it belongs to no one. She was the one who made it. She did not make me, but she took me as her own when she realized that my mother was in the suite with a cyan eye in blackened light. And shortly after I arrived, she nearly lost her hands to a terrible case of Sweet’s disease. But not before she made the scarf I am wearing to prove to us both that she could still hold me with them. And if she were still here in this World Tree, she would be wearing the scarf, not me, and not one of us, not even one me that I have made would be here today, and I would be one person again.
nyoka eden is a writer and intuitive consultant based in Asheville, NC.
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