hotel world (ali smith)

Woooooooo-
hooooooo what a fall what a soar what a plummet what a dash into dark into light what a plunge what a glide thud crash what a drop what a rush what a swoop what a fright what a mad hushed skirl what a smash mush mash-up broke and gashed what a heart in my mouth what an end.
What a life. What a time. What I felt. Then. Gone.
Here's the story; it starts at the end. It was the height of the summer when I fell; the leaves were on the trees. Now it's the deep of winter (the leaves fell off long ago) and this is it, my last night, and tonight what I want more than anything in the world is to have a stone in my shoe. To be walking along the pavement here outside a hotel and to feel a stone rattling about in my shoe as I walk, a small sharp stone, so that it jags into different parts of the sole and hurts just enough to be a pleasure, like scratching an itch. Imagine an itch. Imagine a foot, and a pavement beneath it, and a stone, and pressing the stone with my whole weight hard into the skin of the sole, or against the bones of the bigger toes, or the smaller toes, or the inside curve of the foot, or the heel, or the small ball of muscle that keeps a body upright and balanced and moving across the breathtaking still-hard surface of the world.
Because now that my breath , you might say, has been taken, I miss such itching detail all the time. I don't want anything but it. I worry endlessley at the detail that would never had concerned me, not even for a moment of when I was still alive. For example, just for piece of mind, my fall. I would like very much to know how long it took, how long exactly, and I'd do it again in a minute given the chance, the gift of a chance, the chance of a living minute, sixty whole seconds, so many. I'd do it given only a fraction of that with my full weight behind me again if I could (and this time I'd throw myself willingly down it wooo-hooooo and this time I'd count as I went, one elephant two eleph-ahh) if I could feel it again, how I hit it, the basement, from four floors up, from toe to head, dead. Dead leg. Dead arm. Dead hand. Dead eye. Dead I, four floors between me and the world, that's all it took to take me, that's the measure of it, the length and death of it, the short goodb-.
Quite tall roomy floors, quite quality floors. Nobody could say I didn't have a classy passage out; the rooms very newly and tastefully furnished with good hard expensive beds and cornered high ceilings on the first and second, and a wide grand stairwell I fell parallel to down the back of. Twenty-one steps between each floor and sixteen down to the basement; I fell them all. Quite substantial space from each thick carpet above to each thick carpet below though the basement is stone (I remember it, hard) and the drop was short, less than one complete glorious second per floor I estimate now so long after the event. descent, end. It was something fine. The fall. The feeling. The one-off rough-up; the flight to the bitter end, all the way down to the biting of dust.
A mouthful of dust would be something. You could gather it any time, couldn't you, any time you like, from the corners of rooms, the underneaths of beds, the tops of doors. The rolled-up hairs and dried stuff and specks of what-once-was skin, all the glamorous leavings of breathing creatures ground down to essence and glued together with the used-up leftover webs and the flakes of a moth, the see-through flakes of a bluebottle's dismantled wing. You could easily (for you can do such a thing whenever you choose, if you want to) smear your hand with dust, roll dust's precious little between a finger and a thumb and watch it stencil into your fingerprint, yours, unique, nobody else's. And then you could lick it off; I could lick it off with my tongue, if I had a tongue again, if my tongue was wet, and I could taste it for what it is. Beautiful dirt, grey and vintage, the grime left by life, sticking to the bony roof of a mouth and tasting of next to nothing, which is always better than nothing.
I would give anything to taste. To taste just dust.
Because now that I'm nearly gone, I'm more here than I ever was. Now that I'm nothing but air, all I want is to breathe it. Now that I'm silent forever, haha, it's all words words words with me. Now that I can't, just reach out and touch, it's all I want, is to.
This is how it ended. I climbed into the, the. The lift for dishes, very small room waiting suspended above a shaft of nothing, I forget the word, it has its own name. Its walls, ceiling and floor were all silver-coloured metal. We were on the top floor, the third; it used to be the servants' quarters two hundred years ago when the house had servants in it, and after that the house was a brothel and up there was where the cheap girls, the more diseased or aging girls, were put to sell their wares, and now that it's a hotel and each room costs money every night the smaller rooms still cost a little less because the ceilings are closer to touching their floors up at the top of the house.