Before the Curtain Falls
The door falls shut behind me.
Silence. Then the hallway.
My feet on the carpet. Every step a sound no one hears but me. The air conditioning blows cold air from above and finds every inch of my bare skin. I’m wearing nothing. I left the dress in the room.
The hallway is long. Amber wall sconces. Doors that are all closed. Somewhere behind one of them a man is sleeping. Somewhere behind another a man sits and stares at the wall.
I walk past both of them.
Nobody stops me. Nobody sees me. A naked woman walking a resort corridor at two in the morning and the building simply absorbs it, the carpet swallowing my steps, the amber light neither flattering nor judging, just light. Three years of being looked at. Three years of every room reorganizing itself around the fact of my body. And now this: the indifference of a hallway.
At the end of the hallway a glass door leads to a terrace. Through it I can see the dark outside and somewhere beyond the dark the ocean.
I press the handle.
