Darlings, let me share one of the truly magnificent moments every woman must experience. As with any truly brilliant experience, always strive for more than once. I insist. This particular moment I insist on, goes a little like this. You drop your bag in a hotel room that is entirely, magnificently yours — and feel nothing but perfectly balanced and ready. This is your space, you belong, it is gorgeous, and room service awaits.
No negotiating the temperature. No explaining why you need three pillows. No one wondering aloud if you really need that glass of wine before dinner. Just the slow exhale of a woman who has finally, deliciously, arrived.
I had booked this trip for one reason and changed that reason several times before the plane left the ground. By the time the taxi curved around the headland and I caught my first glimpse of the water — that particular blue that exists only in places that have been beautiful for centuries — the actual reason didn’t matter anymore.
The hotel knew what it was doing. What it was offering was mine to decide. Whitewashed walls. Terra cotta underfoot. A pool the colour of a wish, spilling toward a horizon that refused to hold still. My room had a terrace with two chairs — and I felt a flash of something like triumph that I would need only one. Unless I extended an invitation. Who knew if I might? Not even I, just yet.
Adventure begins the moment you stop waiting for permission to take it.
I decided to change, and go downstairs for a breath of different air and varied possibilities. I knew exactly what to wear.
I ordered something cold, a bit of sweet and a touch of salty and something with olives and good cheese. Good cheese does not require flowery adjectives. I sat with my sunglasses on, watching the afternoon arrange itself. There was a man at the far end of the breezeway reading a paperback he’d clearly had for years. A woman laughing on the phone, one leg draped over the arm of her chair like a sentence that wasn’t finished yet. A couple who had run out of things to say to each other but hadn’t noticed. Neither gave me a glance. Perfect.
And me. Sun on my shoulders. Nobody’s plan. Nobody’s itinerary. A woman who had gone somewhere she had never gone before. Not because of the destination, Beautifuls. The people at the front desk of course knew my name. But this particular version of myself had never been here and over the last few months, well, She needed to stretch. And she would.
Here is what they never put in travel blogs. You can return to the same coastline a dozen times and it will be a different place every time, because- and this is brilliantly exciting - you will be different. You carry the lens. You set the aperture. A woman who has learned a few things about herself turns even the familiar into something she is seeing for the very first time.
Which is not to discount the fact... I thoroughly love they remember my name.
I was on my second drink when the chair next to me became occupied.
I hadn’t heard him sit down. He hadn’t asked if the chair was intended for anyone. I was intrigued. He assumed it was being saved for him. I imagine because there was a time, it had been.
With the easy confidence of someone who had decided something, he jumped into mid conversation. “That’s a very good book, by the way. The ending will destroy you.”
I looked up. He was nodding at the novel I’d set cover-down on the table — the one I’d brought along and hadn’t opened yet. Up close, he had the kind of face that gets better the longer you look at it. Yes, he was sitting a few feet away. But I remembered that from our last little connection.
I picked up my glass slowly.
“I wasn’t planning to read it today,” I said.
“No?”
“I was planning to be destroyed tomorrow.”
Your Weazelle
