Day 5

Start writing a story that...

Step 1: has a character who is angry

Step 2: add this word: wait

Step 3: include dialogue that begins with: There's nobody here but us

Step 4: add a character who: falls asleep

Step 5: add this word: buzz
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I spent two minutes putting the spare pillow over my exposed ear to drown out the noise. I know it was two minutes because I was facing the clock and staring at it the entire time, doing my slow breathing exercises and counting backwards from 100. It usually calms me, but you know how there are certain sounds, or more specifically, certain voices, that just get under your skin and scrape at your eardrum until you want to drown them or yourself just to stop the sound? That's the voice that was having a conversation outside my hotel room door last night.

I tried to wait it out. I used the pillow. I counted. I shoved the blanket over my head. But nothing I did could protect me from that grating sound outside my door. I could feel my blood pressure rising, and I'm not the Hulk or anything, but it's never a good thing when I get angry. Things get thrown. Unfortunate words get said. People get arrested. And by "people" I mean me, so I do try to avoid it.

I had begged the guy at the front desk not to put me in the room close to the main lobby. I know how these things go. People remember to lower their voices in the depths of the labyrinth, where all rooms look the same and a general silence has fallen over everything except the humming ice machine in the hidden vending area. But it takes them a while of walking past closed doors to recognize the quiet. When they are in the lobby, their voices are high. Those first hallways are just an extension of that communal lobby space, where loud conversations are the norm and no one remembers that there might be someone else sleeping nearby.

"There's nobody here but us," I had said quietly. "Can't you just book me into another room? No one has to know they've been switched."

I hand him a folded $20 note and smiled, hopefully. The guy, a kid not much older than my 18-year-old, looked at the money as if it were a dirty tissue and pushed it back at me.

"I'm sorry, sir, but I can't reassign the rooms," he said. "It is strictly against policy. Here's your key. Second door to your left."

And so there I was, waiting for the high-pitched foghorn outside my door to finish discussing her daughter's busy extracurricular schedule. The worst part is that I had been asleep for about an hour before she showed up. I'd flown in on the red-eye, so I was exhausted by 6 o'clock. I barely made it through the client dinner and was finally able to pour myself into bed by 8. I must have dozed off immediately because I remember nothing from when I put my head down on the pillow to when I first heard the screeching in the hallway describing tryouts for soccer and modern dance.

I checked the clock again. It was 10:30. She'd been out there for half an hour, talking about nothing at a volume that had to be disturbing the entire hotel, but seemed to be centered exactly outside my room. My head began to buzz, and I felt the anger rise up in my throat. As part of my anger management course, I had learned quite a few exercises. But they tended to involve dealing with short-term irritations or how I could avoid or walk away from certain situations. None of that applied here. I decided to give her one last minute. And then, well, either here or in jail, I planned to get some sleep.