It’s difficult to overstate how ultimately surreal my recent work trip felt, by the middle of it. I had received the news that Gus had died, and I was not there for it; I was also staying at a hotel in the middle of nowhere — literally, the only thing within walking distance was the office I was visiting every day, and those two things were separated by a highway — and it had been snowing so that even simply being outside for a few minutes felt treacherously cold. I was working too hard by far (generally starting somewhere around 7am and then working through 8:30, at which point I went into the office until around 5, and then back to the hotel to work until 11 or so), which I knew at the time but also didn’t see an alternative to, and hyper-aware of how lonely and sad I was feeling at every single moment, yet also finding no way to change that for any considerable length of time. It was, as I told someone a couple days after coming home, a week that felt like there wasn’t actually any upside, just different flavors of things going wrong.
(That’s a melodramatic way of looking at things, and also one that’s obviously untrue to some degree, but also a reasonable summation of what it felt like at the time.)
Adding to the feeling that all of this was somehow beyond reality was the small detail that the hotel I was staying in was covered in cutesy affirmations that felt entirely, hilariously, at odds with my mental state throughout the entire stay. Written on the wall above my bed was the slogan “Sleep well, dream big,” for example; “Going UP?” written beside the button for the elevator. There as one point where I was climbing the stairs to my room on the day I’d gotten the news about Gus where I saw that the stairs said, “Don’t think of them as stairs, they’re little hurdles for you to overcome,” and I read that and thought, fuck right off.
There was one point where I read the “dream big” just before turning off the light for the night, knowing my sleep schedule was wrecked and I’d have a fitful few hours failing to sleep, and I had the sense that I had accidentally slipped out of the real world and into a very poorly made American indie movie that saw itself as social satire from 20 years ago. In many ways, that feels like the best way of telling you all how bad it felt — that Zach Braff could have wandered into the scene at any moment, and that would have made sense on some level.