ARRIVALS AND DEPARTURES

what no internet for three days does to a mf

Greg Girard. Lotus hotel, Vancouver. 1982

The musician asks me why I don’t have an accent and I tell him it’s because the TV raised me. He thinks I’m being funny and asks me if I’d take pictures of him playing guitar. I tell him to ask the bartender and he makes one of those cartoonishly surprised faces in response. “Well, there’s no one else here to take a photo, and this show,” he gestures at the stage, “is kind of important.”

The bar is empty except for me and a few other journalists. We’re all wearing our press badges and using the vouchers the festival coordinators gave us at the office for free drinks, but they only cover (1) glass of wine or (1) well drink or (1) IPA, so I have to pay for my Guinness myself, which I don’t mind because everything in Canada is cheap anyway. I look at him and shrug, and he sulks to the stage where he plays Sublime and Johnny Cash covers for the next 20-ish minutes while I finish my beer and look over my notes.

Weeks after being scouted and only a week after my sixteenth birthday, my mom bought me an expensive slouchy cardigan and new jeans and my dad called a private car for us to go to a meeting with another modeling agency in Portland. This was before Uber and around the time my mom developed a fear of going anywhere herself. My dad had given me some advice, which was that you must treat every job as if it’s the most important job of your life. An ex-boyfriend told me that’s why he loved Japan so much—everyone took pride in their work. “This is why you have to keep posting, no matter what,” he said. “If people don’t see you doing anything, they’re going to think you’re doing nothing.”

The rain starts up again as I walk back to the hotel. I didn’t have an umbrella or a jacket. I didn’t think to bring either. When I went to Miami in the spring to cover a red carpet for three days I checked a bag and brought every single beauty and skincare product I had with me, a few extra pairs of underwear and a hoodie for the plane, but now I’m in Montreal for a week for a film festival and all I brought was whatever I could fit between my carry on and leather tote. I’ve learned I can live on and with very little, and sometimes I think I’m a better person because of it. Years ago, in Costa Rica–this was before anyone called me a writer, when I was still working at Aritzia–I had to stay one night in a hotel in San Jose where there was a used bar of soap in the shower and a sticky layer of dust on the bathroom mirror. The walls were the color of an overripe peach and the closet didn’t close all the way. I showered in my flip flops. I thought about bed bugs but not as much as I think I should have. I mostly thought about my mom. I used my personal hotspot to watch a documentary about NXIVM on my laptop before falling asleep on top of the yellow-white sheets in the clothes I’d wear to the airport four hours later.

This hotel is much better than that one, but not nearly as nice as the one in Miami, where I became friends with the bartenders and an elderly German couple who had recently moved to Spain. The shower is clean and there’s a nice, big TV. I turn it on and mimic the French-speaking news anchors as I undress. I have a review to write and interview footage to edit but I want to take nudes instead. There’s no one I can send them to though, except for maybe my friends, but nobody’s heard from me in 48 hours and I don’t want anyone to think this is a cry for help. I’m exactly where I need to be, which is nowhere at all, but sometimes I catch myself thinking of hosting a dinner party in a house upstate.