true confessions with strangers
/There’s no better place than a half-naked environment far from home to share your deepest, darkest secrets. Before you know it, people say things. Lots of things. Forbidden things. Take, for example, the hotel hot tub.
With warm water caressing you, bubbles blocking your sight, and resting secure in the knowledge you’ll never see these people again, God willing, it’s the perfect environment for true confessions. And thankfully when your inner bubbly has been spilled—maybe you hate your job or your mate or you wish you could relocate far from your wretched family—everyone dries off and tiptoes far, far away.
You hope.
So there we were, two guys and three girls, soaking away, when one woman blurted, “I’ve never had any confidence in myself.” Right in the middle of a fine hotel in Havana, steam rising, she admitted she wasn’t seeing square with the new boyfriend who was soaking up another kind of liquid at the hotel bar. Pretty soon the hot tub was a hot bed of revelation: “I don’t think I’m such a good mother,” said one. “I haven’t made a new friend in twenty years,” said another. “I’m stressed out like a zebra in a pack of hyenas,” a third chimed in. One personal stick of dynamite after another while the sun set and the next thing you knew, the five of us were bonded like plaque in an artery.
This was the time to tiptoe away, leaving it all to fizzle. But then Lucy, our self-proclaimed control freak, exclaimed, “We’ll never see each other again. Come on, there are only hours to go. Let’s get it all off our chests.”
And in the spirit of what happens at Motel 6 stays there, we obeyed. Masochists, every last one of us.
We met again at the hotel club. No-confidence Janelle and her soon-to-be-dumped Jim were smoking. In the thrill of the over-sharing, I-can-do-better moment, she announced, “This is my last cigarette, and his, too.” Then she pointed in the silent prisoner’s direction. The Marlboro man, waving his glowing stick, was trapped like a zebra: “Whaaat?”
We descended like hyenas: “Do it, do it, do it, do it . . .”
Meanwhile, controlling Lucy wanted to learn to jump into something, anything, because she was an over-planner. Ryan was a loner, someone else was wishy-washy, someone else a perfectionist. Then there was the lazy dude, the scaredy cat, the rationalizer, the one who lived perilously close to the edge.
By three in the morning, the latest I’d stayed up in a decade, we’d left our layers of griminess all over the poor Cuban hotel. Janelle and Jim backed away from the abyss of being smoke-free half a dozen times: “We were just joking, we didn’t mean it, we were getting into the spirit of the moment.”
We threatened to send drones. We were feisty and we wanted other people to do things we couldn’t do ourselves.
By four in the morning, we all admitted we had work to do—I mean who doesn’t?—then we laughed and kissed and hugged and inched toward our rooms, but that wasn’t enough. Lucy was determined to round us up for the kill.
“We have to hold ourselves accountable,” she demanded. “Contact information, come on, right now.” She was our true hyena, adorably young. We were caught.
I’m not going to admit my true confessions of that long evening, because I know you people and those people I didn’t know. Except we didn’t count on social media-obsessed Lucy. She made us form a WhatsApp group to keep us honest.
People these days!
Whatever happened to reveling in the comfort of strangers, saying any dumb thing you want, calling a night a night, then going on your merry, dysfunctional way?