About Hotel Goodbye and Cinder
“Is she here, or where is she?” is what my uncle said to me in response to my sharing with him the following experience I had: I was walking down the street when I remembered my beloved cousin, his niece. I had a jolting thought that she was no longer here. In that moment I realized that I was still grieving her loss. It was just over two years since she had passed.
I had written a short story about a thirty-year-old woman determined to let go of lost love, her childhood innocence. Essentially, the story is about grief. I called it “Hotel Goodbye.”
It was months later that I found myself walking down the street and remembering my cousin. Then after speaking with my uncle, the seed was planted for me to revisit the subject of grief.
Prior to writing “Hotel Goodbye,” there had been a house fire on my street. So whenever I walked by the property, I studied it and wondered about the owners, the occupants. Then one day not long after the unfortunate event, I looked up at one of the front bedroom windows. A curtain still hung there. This outside view juxtaposed a deceptive normalcy with the loss and devastation.
In my mind, the curtain became a character. Its presence was forlorn. It told a story. It had, perhaps, its own story. It spoke to me about the time that had passed since the fire. It spoke to me about the devastation in which the fire resulted. It spoke to me about the loss that was suffered. I tried to capture those sentiments in the following sentence:
The bedroom window curtain that hung behind the pane of glass like a motionless captive seemed to frame the time that had passed.
And so “Cinder” was born. In and through this fictional story, I sought to know who the inhabitants of that house were. There had to be unquestionable grief amongst them. So I discovered that “Cinder” was the conclusion to “Hotel Goodbye.” But the former became an even deeper exploration into the nature and the beginnings, the root, of grief.
I listened to the Hollywood actress Regina King talk about the grief she experienced after her son’s death. She said, “Grief is love that has no place to go.” I felt as though I was equipped with the tools and the necessary language to delve into this follow-up narrative storytelling of Norma West.
Her story, “Hotel Goodbye,” starts when she finds herself in 2020 in a Toronto hotel room during the coronavirus pandemic in a no-way-out type of situation. That story is continued in “Cinder,” where she is compelled to return to the burned-down house in which she and her mother lived.
In my research I’ve learned that “grief is a longing to get back to that part or that essence. We’re learning to say goodbye to whatever it is that has left.” So I wanted to put you the reader in a vivid reality that is filled with the visual themes of loss, devastation, and grief:
But in fact, the debris had been removed and the interior had morphed into a burned-out shell, with the roof trusses and the floor being prepped for new floorboards. Staples and nails protruded.
Her memories of the house itself felt skeletal, much like the now exposed wooden frames that had been painted white and from which the dry walls and the insulation had been removed.
Hopefully, the result of these stories is that you will be transformed.
In my experience of remembering my cousin on that walk, there was a moment when I too, like Norma in “Cinder,” looked around at the street and wondered, Would she, my cousin, remember right here, this place where I stood? Then a bus drove by. It grounded me. Similarly, I’ve found, grief can be that emotion that helps you to face reality and say goodbye, especially when it is necessary.
That process can also ground you.
Visit The Bendiness of Rivers at the end of April later this spring to read both “Hotel Goodbye” and “Cinder.”
