Day 3

Seriously, how much can one look outside the window?  It’s always the same view, yet you look out each time as if what you will see this time will be different than the last.  But it’s the same.

I still look out.  I see the same long, beige-ish white wall of the Hampton Inn across from my balcony, facing my balcony in full length, with forty or so doors dotting the wall at more or less equal intervals, each door a copy of the one to its right and the one to its left, and a copy of the one just above it and the one right below, neatly arranged by an architect into three stories of about fifteen doors each. Next to each door is a large glass window, and another large glass window, and then a door, and then another door, and then another large glass window.  You look closely and you look closer, and… that’s funny, is the architect sending the viewer a Morse code?  Window-door-door, window-window-door…

The doors on each story are all connected by a corridor passing in front of each door.  Each corridor is covered.  In fact, the floor of each corridor is the roof of the corridor right below it, and the roof of each corridor is the floor of the corridor on top of it.  Except for the bottom-most corridor, the floor of which is the earth.  And for the top-most corridor, the roof of which is the sky.  And so these doors and the corridors that connect them, and the stairways that connect the corridors make up a sort of lifeless mediator in between the earth and the sky. But then again… isn’t every structure like that?

I do not know the architect. And the architect does not know me. Yet through this inn with its forty or so evenly arranged doors facing my balcony, we meet one another, on a random Friday morning, because an unknown virus that has shot to world stardom has forced us to stay home and to appreciate what we have and what we did not know we had until now, even though we have had it always, or at least for a long time.

For possibly that architect never had someone admire his work as much as I do now.

And me? I would never appreciate the one-size-fits-all guests of the inn, one no different than the other much like the doors of the rooms they occupied for the weekend, that came and went like people entering and exiting a Vegas hotel through a nonstop revolving door, crazy enough to stay in Glendale when visiting Los Angeles.

Except now that I finally have time to stop and look and think, I realize that they weren’t cookie-cutter guests at all.  I vaguely recall the old man who made his way down from the third floor to the reception to grab hot coffee for himself and his wife of a few decades – despite the morning chill or, maybe, because of it.  The immigrant parents which blasted dance music on the stereo on a gorgeous summer day, for some reason preferring to have their children splash around in the parking lot pool rather than the Pacific Ocean.  Car parked under my window, the pleas of a smooth-talking Russian guy asking his girl to step outside the car and talk with him, only to be showered by the ice-cold pellets of “Nyet” against his ego… at 1 in the morning.  And more than one time, not being able to sleep because of the hoard of Armenian dudes deciding to talk about nothing at all in shouting whispers, where I had to make the journey from bedroom to balcony in my underwear to ask them to մի քիչ կամաց էլի, տղեք ջան (guys, keep it down a bit, please).

They were the ones who opened the doors and lit the lamps behind the windows of the inn that faces my balcony.

The inn is shut down. The windows are dark now.

So, how much can one look outside the window?

Honestly, never enough.