The Dream Hotel

To be a woman was to watch yourself not just through your own eyes, but through the eyes of others.

Historians observe the world, and scientists try to explain it, but engineers transform it. Step by step, they’ve replaced village matchmakers with dating apps, town criers with social media, local doctors with diagnostic tools. The time has come for sages, mystics, and prophets to cede to an AI. In this way, history marches on.

In any case, crime is relative — its boundaries shifting in service of the people in power.

Under the right circumstances, anything can be made into something sinister.

A crime isn’t the same as a moral transgression. The law delineates the former, never the latter. I have done nothing wrong, Sara thinks. It’s only that the line of legality has moved, and now I’m on the wrong side of it.

That no matter how unjust the system is, she is expected to submit to it in order to prove that she deserves to be free of its control.

Life is meant to be lived, to be seized for all the beauty and joy to be wrung out of it; it isn’t meant to be contained and inventoried for the sake of safety.

She has learned to wear a mask of detachment, has become so adept at it that someday, she fears, it may become her only face.

Freedom isn’t a blank slate, she wants to tell them. Freedom is teeming and complicated and, yes, risky, and it can only be written in the company of others.

But what the mind can’t comprehend, the heart has enough sense to feel.

Or perhaps it started before, but content with the small pleasures and enclosed freedoms of her life, she didn’t notice.

If Sara feels sick, it is for home. Home is a baby’s sock under the coffee table, wildflowers on the hallway wallpaper, a window that opens to let in fresh air. Home is the sweet babbling rising from the double cribs after she turns off the light, and the barking of the neighbor’s dog late at night.

But what they don’t see, what they can never truly see unless they had been, like her, confined and controlled, is that isolation is the opposite of salvation, that she owes her release to the women who joined together to say no.

The law separates the permitted from the forbidden, but it doesn’t require that a crime be committed before the agents acting in its name deploy the full force of their power.

She must turn her gaze to the future instead, start thinking like a scientist, or better yet like a software engineer. Historians observe the world, and scientists try to explain it, but engineers transform it. Step by step, they’ve replaced village matchmakers with dating apps, town criers with social media, local doctors with diagnostic tools. The time has come for sages, mystics, and prophets to cede to an AI.

She stood there a minute, looking at the door, her hands balled into fists. Is This Real? I Can’t Tell.

As for Sara's own papa, every letter he writes is a variation on the same themes: he urges her to eat well, exercise, and rest; to work hard in order to avoid any entanglements that might have legal ramifications for her case. The advice makes Sara cringe; her father has never encountered a problem he didnt immediately try to solve through the application of personal effort. Responsibility - and its corollary, blame - were the principles on which he built his life...

what they can never truly see unless they had been

But without an actual crime she can’t prove her innocence—

In any case crime is relative

he might admit to a couple of problems with the current administration’s approach

That no matter how unjust the system is

Freedom is not a blank slate, she wants to tell them. Freedom is teeming, and complicated, and yes — risky. And it can only be written in the company of others.

Isolation is the opposite of salvation.