Loud Retreat

Everything is louder in a dorm room at 1:30 am when I am desperately trying to be quiet. The lock clicking open, the door of my storage space scraping, me pulling out the things that have spilled from my pack so I can repack them.

The idea was to pack then, in the not too wee hours of the morning so that when it was time for me to leave at 7am, I wouldn’t have to wake people up on the other end.

The best of intentions…

I could hear the woman below me stirring. I could feel the bed shake as she adjusted. I watched her light flicker on hastily and then darken again moments later. I projected meaning onto the flash- a visual sigh of irritation, a silent "screw you." 

I couldn’t blame her. A few days before I'd been roused by someone's alarm that they seemed too inept or uninterested to turn off. And in other dorms I've listened to people slam doors, carry on conversations, and flick on lights, as I tried to sleep.

Having just disturbed a room full of veritable strangers despite my best efforts, maybe the loud and decisive noise would have been best. Forget the slow motion tiptoeing, just grab what I need as quickly as possible- noise be damned. Quick and dirty, the packing version of a band-aid removal.

It was more than last minute packing. When I finally climbed the perilous ladder to my higher than average bunk and realized I needed to find a place to stay in my new destination, I dimmed my phone and hunkered down searching out a space to rest my body after the next day’s transit.

Success! I found a place only to realize I'd left my wallet with my credit card in the bag stowed under the bed below me. More scrambling down the ladder, more scraping doors, more shifting and flicking lights in the bed below me.

At last, settled for the night, staring at the time and calculating how few hours of sleep I'd get before I had to wake myself, and through proximity, my bunk-mates. The room finally silent, my bunk finally still, my adapter plunged from its socket so high up with a startling clatter amplified by the quiet of the room.

I climbed down again. Its retrieval made all the more awkward because it settled in the space by my bunk-mate's head.

Sigh.

I’d want to curse me out.

In the morning my packing required final touches. There were things I had needed the night before; hygiene, medication, night clothes, flip flops. All of those things had to be integrated into the travel bag. I grabbed everything and moved into the hallway where any noise I'd be making would be muffled through the doors. I brushed my teeth in a separate bathroom and prepared to leave.

Downstairs, I sat in the hostel for a few moments, checking and sometimes rechecking that I had everything (paranoid after my mishap in Japan) and then left my key in the little tray set aside for that purpose and listened to the door click quietly close behind me.