The Hotel That Taught Me Time Isn’t Linear
There are places you carry inside. Not like luggage, but like breath. The Oloffson Hotel in Port-au-Prince was that place for me. More than a building, it was a portal.
This week it burned. Gone in flames, one more loss in a country already aching.
Photo of The Oloffson Hotel in Port-au-Prince : lucianf, CC BY 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons
The hotel was old, ornate, full of carved wood and history. A gingerbread mansion from another century, it had survived earthquakes, dictatorships, and blackouts. Its verandas opened to a lush garden, where the air moved in slowly, warm and scented, like a memory you could inhale.
I slept there more than once. It wasn’t just a stay. It was a state of grace. Something in the rhythm of that place slowed the heart, invited you to feel, to dream.
I danced to RAM on Thursday nights. Foreigners, diplomats, poets, street vendors, lovers. We all became locals inside those walls, where the music pulsed and the night felt wide. Between songs, flushed and laughing, we’d find each other, talking, catching our breath, becoming part of something unrepeatable.
And I dreamed, as many had. Graham Greene sat there once, and wrote of dictators and ghosts, of velvet nights and haunted hearts like mine. I also like to remember the vendors who lingered near the gate at night, the boy who fixed the fan in my room, the coffee poured slowly before returning to the UNICEF compound where I worked. It was in that same place, in that rhythm of days and nights, that a love began. Unexpected, quiet, and deep.
The kind of love that anchors you in your body, makes you notice everything. A love that has grown through years and distances and still shapes my days.
Ketounette, CC BY‑SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons
Now the hotel is gone. But here’s the thing: it isn’t. Not really.
Because memory doesn’t vanish with walls. What nourishes us stays.
As I write about longevity, I return to this truth: well-being is not only in habits, metrics, or physical health. It lives also in the people and places that leave their imprint, in the love we carry, the memories we keep, and the past we allow to soften us. The Oloffson still lives in me. A place where I felt fully alive. Where something lasting began.
- Donatella
Read the New York Times article about the hotel.