ONCE YOU GO BLACK...
A confession.
I need to be honest about something that started in January.
Jessica and I were in New Orleans. A work trip we stretched into a long weekend, the kind of thing they call bleisure now, because that is what you do when you are already somewhere good and Friday ends at noon. We had booked one hotel. When we went to add the extra night, they were full, so we moved across town to another one. Jessica is flexible. She moves, she flows, she goes right along with it. She makes the whole thing easy.
The new place put us in a room I can only describe as a basement. No windows. Not one. It looked like a hostel dorm, the kind of room where people sleep in shifts. We stood in the doorway and looked at each other. We were a little leery. But the room was only for sleeping, so we dropped the bags and went out.
Dinner and live jazz at our favorite spot. We came back late. We turned off the lights.
I have never slept like that in my life.
It was dark. Not dim. Dark. The kind of dark where you cannot find your own hand. It was cold. And it was, without exaggeration, the best night of my life.
I could not stop thinking about it on the drive home.
So I did what any reasonable man does when he finds something that good. I tried to recreate it.
I bought blackout curtains on Amazon.
I hung them the day they arrived. Then I stood in the dark and waited for my eyes to adjust, and I started finding the leaks. The smoke detector had a little green light. Tape. The router blinked from across the room. Tape. Every charger, every plug, every device with a status light it never needed. Tape, tape, tape. I had a roll of black gaffer’s tape, and I went around that room like a man decommissioning it.
The curtains came up an inch too narrow. Where they met in the middle, a blade of light got through. So I clipped them shut with a potato chip clip and pulled the whole thing taut from the side. You cannot see the light until the lights are off and you are already in bed. Then you see it. And you cannot leave it there. One of us gets up. Usually me.
That is the part I did not see coming. It is not that we want the dark now. We need it. If the room is not right, we fix it before we can sleep. We have standards. We have a ritual.
Once you go black, you can’t go back.
I want to tell you it stopped there.
For her birthday we drove up to Dahlonega, Georgia. Last minute, no plan, the good kind of trip. We split the drive and stopped for a night at a Home2 Suites. Nice enough. The shades hung a few inches off the window, so light came in around the edges. Jessica pointed it out. I had already seen it.
I travel with duct tape. That is a sentence about a grown man that I am choosing to leave in.
I taped the shade to the window frame. It did not hold all night. It held long enough to get us under.
The cabin was the real test.
The only one left was billed as a honeymoon cabin, which meant a jacuzzi inside the cabin itself. I know what you are thinking. We did not get in it.
The cabin was rough. A water stain on the ceiling where someone had patched a leak. A couch that smelled like a gym bag. It was hot inside when we walked in, and Jessica runs cranky when she is hot, so I went to work. Turned the AC down as far as it would go, cut off the dehumidifier that was quietly breathing heat into the room, and took her to dinner while the place cooled off. We came back. Cool. I had solved it. I was proud of myself.
Then we turned off the lights, and the cabin lit up like noon.
The jacuzzi room had its blinds wide open. The door to the living room was glass, so the living room poured in. The back door to the deck had blinds I had never closed. We were in the mountains. In Georgia. You would bet money on darkness up there. You would lose. At four in the morning I opened my eyes and the room was bright enough to read in.
The couch, the leak, the jacuzzi. None of it mattered. The problem was the light. It was always going to be the light.
So that is the confession. A windowless basement room in New Orleans ruined me for every other room on earth. Jessica went right along with it, which is either love or a shared condition, and at this point I cannot tell the difference.
Some nights I wake up at three, and she is already awake, and one of us is up pressing a curtain flat against the wall so the other one can sleep. Nobody says anything. We fix it and lie back down in the dark.
Once you go black, you’ll never go back. I would tell you it is a problem, but I sleep too damn well to mean it.