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Motel | Apr 23 2003

My friend David took his three-year-old son Jacob to the aquarium. At the octopus tank he realized he had a problem: the tank was empty. This could only mean one thing.

“I guess the octopus went away,” said David, hoping to leave it at that.

Jacob wasn’t so easily satisfied. “I know where it went,” he said.

“Where?”

“It went to the motel.”

This became a little joke between David and me. When life is over, you go to the motel. Christ stayed at the motel for three days, then came back for a visit. Love, when it dies, simply moves to the motel, where it spends its days flipping through the cable channels.

Later I realized that the motel must be enormous, bigger even than the world, bigger even than the universe. It’s so big in fact that you can’t tell it’s a motel, because you can never stand outside it.