Lobby Hours
On the freedom of being no one in particular.
There’s a hotel bar I go to sometimes when I need to disappear without leaving the city.
The W is ten minutes from my apartment—close enough to walk, far enough to feel like somewhere else. I push through the doors, and the shift is immediate: warm light, lounge music low enough to think under, staff who greet you like you might be anyone. And that’s the thing. You might be.
No one knows if you’re a guest or a local. No one knows if you’re waiting for someone or waiting for nothing. You’re just a guy at a bar in a hotel, and the anonymity isn’t cold—it’s room to breathe. Or maybe room to hope. I’m not always honest with myself about which one it is.
I usually order a Paper Plane or an Old Fashion and sit somewhere I can watch the room. People move through hotel lobbies differently than they move through their own lives. They’re between things. Arriving, leaving, killing time before a flight or a meeting or a date they’re nervous about. There’s a lightness to it. A sense that anything could happen because no one’s staying long enough for it to matter if it doesn’t.
Strangers smile more in hotels. They make small talk without the weight of it becoming anything. Everyone’s passing through, so no one’s trying to build.
And I think that’s why I keep going back.
Not just for the escape. Not just for the quiet. But because the lobby is full of people I haven’t met yet.
Dating in this city has a ceiling. Especially in the gay community. The apps are a closed loop—same faces rotating through, same profiles surfacing every few months with new photos and the same old patterns underneath. I know their histories. I know their exes. I know which ones say they’re single when they’re not. I’ve learned to read the small lies, the half-truths, the “it’s complicated” that means exactly what you think it means.
The village is smaller than it looks. After a while, everyone becomes a known quantity.
So I sit in a hotel lobby with a cocktail and watch strangers pass through. People from other cities, other lives, other orbits entirely. People without a file. People I haven’t already figured out.
And somewhere in the back of my mind—somewhere I don’t always admit to—I think: maybe.
Maybe tonight someone sits down who doesn’t know anyone I know. Maybe someone catches my eye who isn’t already tangled in someone else’s story. Maybe the transience works in my favour for once. A stranger passing through who decides to stay for one more drink.
I don’t know if that’s hope or just a story I tell myself, so I have somewhere to go on a Thursday night.
I don’t know if the lobby is a real chance or a gentle lie, I’ve dressed up in nice lighting and a well-made cocktail.
But I keep going back. That part isn’t complicated.
Some nights I write. Some nights I just sit. Some nights I make small talk with someone visiting from somewhere else, and it’s good—light, easy, the kind of connection that doesn’t ask for anything because neither of us will be here next week.
Some nights I walk home and feel lighter. Some nights, the quiet of my apartment hits harder than it did when I left. Some nights I wonder if I’m expanding my chances or just avoiding the ones that actually require risk—the ones where someone might know my name, my history, my patterns. The ones where I’m not anonymous. The ones where it could actually cost me something.
The travellers have luggage and itineraries, and people waiting for them in other time zones. I have a Paper Plane and a seat by the window and this small, stubborn hope that refuses to call itself what it is.
The lobby doesn’t ask anything of you. It doesn’t need you to be figured out or healed or past the things you’re still inside of. It just lets you exist in the in-between for a while.
And maybe that’s all I’m doing and existing in the in-between. Waiting for someone to pass through who makes staying feel like an option.
But the lights are warm, the drink is good, and the door keeps opening.
Someone I haven’t met yet might walk through it.