Hotel Habitue: The Finale

By J.L. Mackey

I started this series not long after I took my current job. Admittedly, it turned into equal parts griping about and documenting my life on the road. If you really want to read them all, you can find them here. But suffice it to say things only ever got bleaker with time. 

When I took this job, I tried hard to not think about leaving it - even though that was the plan from the beginning. Looking forward to the end meant counting days, which means forcing time to drag even more slowly than it otherwise would. I needed it to fly by. I spent nights binge drinking, writing bad blogs and decent novellas, and writing thousands of lines of python. I watched the decent pay pile up in the bank account.

But I also watched my friendships suffer, my hobbies suffer, and my wife suffer. My wife has been pregnant with my son for seven months now. I am hundreds of miles away for weeks on end as things become more challenging for her, as she grows more tired. Bearing a burden almost entirely alone. I am funding a life I haven’t experienced in years, a patron of some other man’s comfortably middle-class endeavors  - only that man hardly exists. Bleeding and breaking myself off for fifty hours a week in pursuit of goals that didn’t feel likely most of the time. I tried to keep from thinking about it too much at work, lest I hurl myself from some great height in immeasurable guilt. Somehow feeling like my father who was also absent, but with different intentions. That is to say, none at all. 

I stopped drinking so much on the road and tried to get lost in software development. A month or so ago, my wife saw to fruition her lifelong dream of being a college professor. Weight that felt welded to my back began to ease. Not long after, I interviewed for a tech position and accepted a very good job. Before I knew it, we were talking about buying a house, and then putting in an offer on one. Closing is but a few weeks off, now. It’s beautiful, and we might be in it forever. When it rains, it pours.

I am still at my current job for another five or six weeks, saving PTO so that I have overlapping pay with my new job. I gave my boss two months notice, which he was appreciative of, what with our staffing issues and recently lost senior employees. He asked me if I was willing to stay with the company and only do projects near to where I would be living. With a straight face, I told him it would take a quarter million dollars a year. Which was, in a sense, a lie. Being almost entirely absent from my newborn son’s life seems like the gravest of injustices. A personal spiritual Holocaust. A self-filleting of my own soul. 

To be clear, it’s not a bad job. It’s about as good as a job on the road can be. But it requires a man of particular build, a man willing to forego many of the things I feel are non-negotiables.

Now, I spend my hours at work thinking of home improvement projects, a garden in the backyard, teaching my son to ride a bike in the driveway. Garage beers with my hopefully genial neighbors. Fever dreams as I sweat my ass off in the rural South for just a little while longer. 

After a literal decade of planning, that the end is in sight is so surreal as to be barely believable. Barely tolerable. Like knowing the exact day upon which you’ll win a hundred million dollars in the lottery. They say self-won victories are the sweetest. I feel like I’m joining the Rockefellers. I seem to have won in every way that matters. Time for life, passions, projects, mowing the lawn? Fucking incredible. People in ravaged third world counties kill for such luxuries. A line I personally was nearing.

The hotel rooms feel a little less like prisons now, the highways a little less interminable, the sweat and dust and aching bones a little more tolerable. My junior employees still wear bleak expressions, with no lights currently at the end of their tunnels. I tell them there could be a curve up ahead, a welcoming vista of their own making, just waiting for them.