Foreign Hotel Windows.

I finished reading On The Road for the first and incredibly delayed time during the summer after I had graduated high school. With no plans of anything beyond reading in the summer sun while working at the local grocery store, I lived vicariously through Kerouac's writing--all while suffering from agoraphobia and hardly actually moving around at all, myself.

One paragraph towards the beginning of the book has always haunted me, feeling so incredibly reminiscent of something in my memory that I couldn't ever quite touch entirely. I recently started re-reading the book, and this piece still affects me just the same:

"Now I wanted to sleep a whole day. So I went to the Y to get a room; they didn't have any, and by instinct I wandered down to the railroad tracks--and there's a lot of them in Des Moines--and wound up in a gloomy old Plains inn of a hotel by the locomotive roundhouse, and spent a long day sleeping on a big clean hard white bed with dirty remarks carved in the wall beside my pillow and the beat yellow windowshades pulled over the smoky scene of the railyards. I woke up as the sun was reddening; and that was the one distinct time in my life, the strangest moment of all, when I didn't know who I was--I was far away from home, haunted and tired with travel, in a cheap hotel room I'd never seen, hearing the hiss of steam outside, and the creak of the old wood of the hotel, and footsteps upstairs, and all the sad sounds, and I looked at the cracked high ceiling and really didn't know who I was for about fifteen strange seconds. I wasn't scared; I was just somebody else, some stranger, and my whole life was a haunted life, the life of a ghost. I was halfway across America, at the dividing line between the East of my youth and the West of my future, and maybe that's why it happened right there and then, that strange red afternoon."

-Chapter 3, On The Road by jack Kerouac.

The Americans by Robert Frank includes one specific photograph which, likewise, has always provided me with the exact same feeling (as if it may be describing the same moment from the same travels). Together, the two are always in some not-to-distant part of my mind, as an echo of some surreal feeling. This recurs more and more vibrantly the more distant the idea of home becomes, and the more brief-yet-familiar encounters come and go.

From The Americans, Robert Frank