Blissful stranded freedom

Monday, 7 p.m. Because of a snowstorm, I find myself stranded in Toronto. The thing to appreciate about being stranded is that you can suspend your decision-making. There’s nothing to do and in a world of everything to do, it feels nice. I purchase a hotel room online.

8:00 There’s no one at the check-in desk, but there is a bell. Who am I to ring a bell?

8:02 Gathering up my courage, I smack the bell. The sound is crisp and clean, like striking a glockenspiel – an instrument, incidentally, that I used to play in my juniour high school band. With the dinging comes a flood of memories. Painful memories. An overflowing toilet of painful, awful memories. Walking home with my glockenspiel, I sounded like an ice-cream truck falling down a fire escape. “It’s called a glockenspiel,” I told the gathering children. But no matter how many times I repeated the word, they still pronounced it “dorkenspiel.”

8:03 The desk clerk emerges, interrupting my reverie. He asks for my credit card and, although I’ve been staying in hotels for the entirety of my adult life, I’m compelled to ask the question: “Only for incidentals, right?” The clerk nods his head and I feel my stomach unclench.

10:05 It’s too late for room service, so I order pizza from a nearby restaurant. It turns out they only offer one size: large.

10:10 I flip stations and wait. Godzilla is on hotel cable and so I watch it. As Godzilla wanders the streets stomping people, I find myself wondering: does Godzilla sit down?

11:15 The pizza box containing left-overs won’t fit in the mini fridge. So the hotel staff won’t think it’s garbage, I place the box in the hotel safe.

11:40 My room has a king-size bed. I stretch out my arms and legs, a pinwheel of loneliness. The world of pizzas and beds is too large for a person alone.

5:55 a.m. The curtains don’t seem to close and there’s a blinding light from the parking lot shining directly into my eyes. I get up and head downstairs for my complimentary breakfast.

6:10 A bowl of fruit loops and coffee cream. Stranded!

7:00 I head back to the room, open the safe and wrap the remaining pizza in a hotel-issued plastic shower cap. I’ll eat it while waiting for my flight back home where I won’t have the safety net of being stranded – home, where, like everyone else, I’ll have to take responsibility for the dumb choices I make.