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She comes to her room and has to face the stillness, the quietness. She fiddles around inher purse until she finds her glasses, that are torn and feathered. She chuckles because sheknows that glasses are not torn, feathered like tattered fabric, like mob-lynchedindividuals. She cannot penetrate the silence of this generic hotelroom, she tries not tolisten to the silence. She dislikes the creepiness of being all by herself and she dislikessitting downstairs in the bar and write. Her knee is acting up and kingston is quiet, is verywhite. Outside is stillness, snow, ice, lake ontario. She sees the furniture on the balconythrough the white curtains, she feels so very out of place. This funny little hotelroom isher home now for five very long days and it will be for five more days. She listens tosomeone crackingly walking outside, on the muffling carpets. She ponders, if listening tothe television would mask as human interaction, she knows it will only worsen her feelings of abandonment, alienation. She is not comfortable with silence, with quietness.She is no Roald Amundsen. She likes laughter around her, voices spitting at each other,humanity at its best and at its worst. She hunches over to jot down these her ideas, her thoughts; her documentation of what she feels. The nightstand is very clean, very polished, very sanitary. The black watch has round eyes, so does the bottom of thelampstand. Her hands are very wrinkled and she likes that. All the women in her familyhave superwrinkled hands. At a very young age. There is continuity in that. She looks ather hands which look like hands that work all day. They do not. She writes, she draws, alot that is, but only with her right hand. Sometimes she types, but not these days.An ambulance is screaming by, somewhere on its way to KGH or Hotel Dieu Hospital.53
 
She sometimes goes to Hotel Dieu, has a tea, some crackers, some cheese, poutine. Shehas a strange routine here in this strange city. She writes, she draws, eats, sleeps, goes for walks in the snow, watches the day go by. She is slightly frightened, a door shuts outside.She cannot stop writing, she puts down letter after letter after letter. She will go down andhave a tea. Something with peaches in it, peachflavoured tea. Maybe a scone. Shemeticulously writes down, what she devours. She misses people. She thinks about her next art installation in Montreal. There is no art installation, there never will be. She iscontent with that, maybe visual arts is not her thing. It does not pay well anyways.Architecture would be good, though. Doesn’t pay well either. She listens to the silence.Again and again. She used to write songs. None of them was good. They filled up a lot of space, scrunched up, piled up in waste baskets the world over. In lonely, stale hotelrooms.She just went to a small mystery novel bookstore on the way to Hotel Dieu. It was beautiful, clean and nice. The bookseller was very nice. They bonded instantly, she andhim. She asked him about a Swedish husband and wife team of mystery novel writers,who published about 30 years ago. He looked it up, he knew their names, though hethought their heyday was in 1976, she thought, it was more 1971, maybe 72. He was verycute in a bookish, quiet, middle-aged bearded way, in a very inobtrusive masculinity, that bordered on femininity. In a scholastic, intellectual but not too intellectual manner. Sheusually prefers very sharpminded intellectual guys, who pierce through crap like asnowplough. Pied pipers. On the way to ultimate destruction. Out of Hamlin, intoHamlin. Or Hameln. She had a picture book about that, when she was a little girl. Therats and the piper. Somehow the piper became the ultimate in male competency, thealpha-male. Or 
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