BY KAILEY TEDESCO
My dreams have been so vivid since closing myself into my home. I’ve always had detailed dreams, but lately it feels as though I can reach out and touch them. They’re there, floating around me. Something corporeal.
I often dream about fantasy suites and honeymoon hotels. Sometimes too much.
This isn’t totally new. Last summer, I wrote a little bit about Penn Hills Resort and why it fascinates me. On a particularly poor mental health week, for both me and my husband, we decided we needed to do something. We had to see something beyond the walls of our home. We thought it would be safe to go to Penn Hills Resort, for the first time. We’d wear our masks and keep our distance, we told ourselves. The whole goal of visiting abandoned buildings is to wander unseen, so we figured this would be the ideal day trip.
We drove past the resort, parted by a curving road where drivers disregard the speed limit. We parked about a half a mile away and walked. Passersby yelled from their cars, warning us not to jump the fence, not to go in.
We did, of course.
And nothing about the buildings or rooms felt as dreamlike as I thought they would. Mostly, it was just sad. A giant, crumbling monument to couples celebrating the birth of their love. A museum of intimacy. A wedding bell pool full of wood planks & maggots. A danger, really.
We went into and out of rooms as quietly as we could. Shards of broken mirror stabbed unsuccessfully into our shoes. There was no cell service. The rooms formed a maze around overgrown basketball courts. You could get lost so easily & never be found.
We heard screeching coming from deep under the ground. We were afraid to check, but we knew we had to.
We found a fawn, stuck in a hole, surrounded by splintering wood & sewage. After hours and phones calls and the purchase of rubber gloves and boots and threats from the towing company and a few new friends, the fawn escaped safely. We went home feeling so grateful, but frightened by the thought of what else might be struggling to get out of Penn Hills.
This day wasn’t a dream, but it feels like one.
***
The irony of our day trip to these abandoned fantasy suites, each strewn with mattress springs and the fuzz of torn red carpeting, was not lost on me.
My husband and I have been finding it more difficult to communicate our needs to one another since the pandemic began. We got into a routine of watching horror movies and thrillers every night. His pick, my pick, each night after dinner. Over and over again.
He would whisper All the Colors of the Dark. I would share Swallow. He’d say Vivarium. I’d request To Die For. We spoke our fears through the movies we chose. We let our heart beats accelerate with the tension of the film. We’d escape into the relationships on screen, turning up the volume so their anxieties could drown out our own.
This, for a while, became the extent of our intimacy.
We had difficulty figuring out what to talk about besides the movies we had watched the night before. It felt safe to anchor ourselves to this escapism. We were building a different kind of fantasy suite in our own home. Our marriage briefly lived inside the television.
And we knew why.
Before the lockdowns even began, we were both presented with different, but equally upsetting, news about our loved ones. Suddenly, we found ourselves separated from those loved ones, physically. Our mental health deteriorated. We didn’t know how to ask for help. We slowly became each other’s only support system. Mostly, we forgot how to give one another support because we each became so focused on needing that support ourselves.
The horror movies and the routines made it easier to focus our minds elsewhere to the point where, I think, we both forgot we were using them to avoid our fears and started using them, unknowingly, to avoid one another. They did the talking for us, so we could slip away.
There were nights my husband would catch me curled and crying quietly in the bathtub. There were nights I’d find him playing games on his phone for hours and hours, his eyes glazed and empty. We lived most of the days in separate rooms. It got difficult. We were lonely and isolated, but we were together. This, in itself, felt like something to flee from.
I remembered how we helped the fawn to escape the damage of Penn Hills. I was so happy to see something so beautiful survive all of that wreckage.
It was hard not to cling to this as a symbol for how we could learn from this, from each other, and go on.
***
I knew that marriage was so much more than a fantasy suite, but for a while that was all I could remember.
During one of the final weeks of 2019, we celebrated our honeymoon at the Madonna Inn in California. What was supposed to be a week long trip got shortened to just two nights. Our puppy has a hard time being separated from us, and even though he had a sitter we trusted, we knew we would have to be fast.
Regardless of the trip’s brevity, those two nights will forever be two of my favorites. From the moment we stepped onto the enchantingly gaudy floral carpet of the lobby, everything for the next 48 hours would taste of champagne and giddiness. Our first room, named Carin, made us gasp. Gold cherubs hung from the ceiling. Sunlight, stained pink from the walls, got into our hair and into the folds of our clothes.
That pink light shrouded our bodies rolling on carpet, licking thick frosting from our cake spoons, sprawling in the gardens by the pond. The hotel made everything feel palatable and romantic. We wore outfits that we knew would match the wallpaper. Secretly, we hoped the walls might absorb us and we’d be locked together in our suite, forever. Just us and the faux starlight gleaming from the room’s sequined ceilings.
The two days ended and we did not get to stay there, locked in forever.
Not there.
***
A few months into the lockdown, we made the decision to be more intentional about breaking habits that were keeping us from each other. We had thought that, if being locked in a place like the Madonna Inn felt so delicious, being locked into our own home would as well. And this wasn’t the case. And that was okay.
We realized fantasy suites and honeymoon hotels are costumes, and this is why we love them so much. They dress you up in the illusion of beauty, of perfect intimacy. They tell you you’re deep in a jungle or at the entrance of a cave. They leave champagne bottles on your bed and roses in your bathtub. They let you play make believe for a while, and you get tipsy off the breath of it.
And it’s wonderful.
But, then you go back to the way things were.
My husband and I realized that we spent a lot of our marriage feeling wonderful, and we acknowledge how privileged we are to have had so many beautiful experiences. But the culmination of tragedy around us, and our own inability to realize our own home was not a fantasy suite, no matter how much we wanted it to be, woke us up from the dream. There were real horrors happening, some of them to us and so, so many around us.
It was irresponsible to try to escape any of it any longer, and we needed to do something about it. We needed to relearn how to confront this sadness together.
***
On YouTube, there must be hundreds of accounts that offer tours of honeymoon hotels, abandoned or otherwise. In the ongoing series, A Pretty Cool Hotel Tour, a couple tours fantasy suites across the country all the while musing on the nature of love, marriage, and sex. They talk about how these rooms and these experiences help them connect and learn about one another, but they also discuss how you can take this new knowledge of your partner home with you.
My husband and I are working through a lot now because we want to be able to show up for one another, even when we’re struggling individually. We know that there’s no magical room for us to run away to. We are here, in our own home, and we have each other. We’re learning. We still watch our horror movies and we still research fantasy suites to visit when it’s safe, but we’re navigating a new stage of our relationship. And we’re at peace with the fact that it isn’t mirror shards floating in an abandoned heart tub, and it also isn’t feeding each other pink champagne cake every morning.
We’re at home together, taking care of each other the best that we can. We’re remembering our partnership is more than its setbacks. We watch the YouTube videos and talk about how we’ll one day be able to visit these hotel rooms again, but we also talk about what we can do right now. We talk about how our home can be a place of intimacy and romance, but also a place of safety and growth.
We’re remembering, however cheesy it might be, that the fantasy doesn’t exist without love, and love doesn’t exist without work.
Kailey Tedesco lives in the Lehigh Valley with her husband and many pets. She is the author of She Used to be on a Milk Carton (April Gloaming Publishing), Lizzie, Speak (White Stag Publishing), and These Ghosts of Mine, Siamese (Dancing Girl Press). She is a senior editor for Luna Luna Magazine and a co-curator for Philly's A Witch's Craft reading series. Currently, she teaches courses on literature and writing at Moravian College and Northampton Community College. For further information, please follow @kaileytedesco.