There will be no call for cosmetics where I’m going. I dry myself with a towel hardly bigger than a pillow case, too small to reach across my back even if it wasn’t frayed, but I’m more mindful of the fact that this is the last towel I will use, my last shower for forty days. Stepping into the stall, I’m met with a meager but needle-sharp spray, making me all the more aware that by tonight I’ll be in a place where there are no pipes, no hot water, no water at all. The bathroom tile slickens with steam as hot water floods through the shower pipes. By tonight I’ll be where there is no news.

By tonight I’ll be where there are no heaters. No bedstands, no lamps.įlicking on the television to the local news, I pad across the room to a metal unit beneath the window that blows cold air in summer and hot in winter.

I slide one leg to the floor and then the other, slowly, deliberately, more deliberately than I have ever risen from bed before, aware as the sheets fold back that by tonight I will be in a place where there are no sheets at all. The fog that first engulfed my mind is gone, and I take in the room’s contents in a single sweeping glance-from the orange short-pile carpet to the mismatched blue-and-gold upholstered chairs, from the dresser that doubles as a coffee table to the floor-length mirror with a large gash in its pressboard frame. It was set to go off in fifteen minutes anyway. I squint in the sudden glare to read the dial on my wind-up travel alarm. The advantage of Motel 6s is that they’re all almost exactly the same, and I’ve stayed in enough of them to locate the light over the faux wood bedstand even in the dark. I am in Salt Lake City on the edge of the Great Salt Lake, on the edge of the Great Salt Lake Desert, one of the most remote and rugged wildernesses in the United States. Yesterday morning I watched seagulls float over the Pacific shore in California. I checked in last night after driving all day, fourteen hours. Motel 6s have rubber-lined curtains and HBO on channel 3, but they don’t have clock radios. I don’t see any glowing numbers on a digital clock, and the clues begin to come together. The beam strikes a television mounted on brackets high on the opposite wall. I rise to my elbows and notice the faint beam of a streetlight shining through a crack where rubber-lined curtains don’t quite close. My eyes dart around for anything familiar, even a clock. No bedroom, no kitchen, no home of my own, not anymore, but I am in a room. My mind struggles to make any sense of my surroundings. For the past three years I’ve traveled almost constantly from coast to coast, north to south, back and forth. The terrifying thing is that I could be anywhere. I wake to pitch black with no idea where I am.

Sojourn by Gina Lake