Red and bright green and purple, the bruised color of healing knees, the words had been poured out like cool water from a glass pitcher onto the kitchen floor, the one your mother kept in the china cabinet that you always wanted to use, but never got to; splashed, splattered, smeared onto the walls. Or like mud and sand out of the bottoms of your shoes, speckled with tiny shells outside on a cloudy day on a dirty beach. Or maybe like a bucket of chlorinated water, the smell of it always makes you think of that summer you spent alternating from the sun to the shade, swimming among the concrete and under the diving board, there were flashes of lightning. You were dangerous because life was dull, you said it was safe at the time, comfortable, but it was dull, and life desperately needed lightning, something to electrify you, from the inside out, although you didn’t realize it at the time. Whatever the case, however, the water/sand and mud shells, was poured, and the words were on the wall. The words came from souls, souls that were empty and needed filling, hollow, or else souls that were so damn full of emotions it made them jump up and down—hunger, ecstasy, butterflies, confusion, wonder, and awe. For those who had these full souls, the words spilled like water—the pitcher, remember?—onto the walls of the room, clear and smooth. Easy, you know just how to describe yourself: I am ______. I feel ______. For those who had empty souls, the writing was painful, like extracting a splinter. It was godless, and it was clear in a different way, like a sharp winter day, full of nothingness, and a dull ache. People held hands as they wrote on the walls, those who were unafraid of the feeling of touching and being touched, this is not everyone. Fingers interlocked and thumbs tracing soothing outlines usually facilitated the true kind of writing. Because you recognize what needs to be written on these walls of this room when you stand side by side, even if they don’t understand, even if you don’t understand, it’s okay, there’s nothing wrong with not understanding yourself. And the handwriting—some was scrawled, like the writer wished for it to remain a secret, and maybe if I just write it faster, I can get it all out less painfully. Some were written carefully, with pleasure and relief, pride and acceptance, because this is me and here I am. And when you stand inside the room, you feel as though you are standing inside a spider web because all the writing is interconnected. It’s exhausting, it makes you heart pound because tiny strings are shooting off the walls and joining to the other side because they are the same thing, they are attracted because they are identical. So you feel raw and unprotected amidst it all, like a peeled apple, enveloped in the words and in the human condition. You feel lonelier than you have ever felt in you life because loneliness is something as common as breathing, as thinking. Like you are wrapped up in a blanket in your favorite bed with the secrets and emotions contained in the words, spread out upon, under, beside, along you. It is akin to the feeling of lying beside someone in bed for the first time and feeling a familiarity of being human, and also a strangeness of contact, and even an invasion. But above all, the words crush you, wonderfully crush you, like someone kissing you too hard, and you feel bruised, naked. Because you are ineffective to all the words, you cannot fix them or cover them up, because you ARE all the words, every one of them is a part of you, flowing through your blood and into you heart, through your ventricles and out, all the way to your fingers and toes, making them tingle with the sheer electricity that makes you shake, makes your face turn red.
“It’s fine, it’s fine.”
“But when you said that, I believed you.”
“The world is beautiful, and the best part about it is you and your eyelashes.”
“The words didn’t come to me when I needed them.”
“I fell for you because I hadn’t fallen for anyone else.”
That’s what it said, and the walls were white at first, but as the words were written, colors appeared, sort of like tie-dye, but more like that light box, the one with the sand and the colored light glowing from underneath, vibrant and soft. It was like the great work of art, “this room belongs in a museum,” you thought. Nothing had yet been created that SHOUTED, whispered, shook you by the shoulders, reached out and touched your cheek and violated you because it left you exposed under fluorescent lights, it was too much of you and was difficult to show because you were the kind of person who didn’t show yourself, you skin, your gums, the insides of your hands and legs, the nape of your neck your spine. Some didn’t know what to say so they quoted, they scribbled Dylan and Dante and Donne and Camus and Kerouac across the walls, they wrote the word “incandescent” over and over again because it was their favorite word, and also Virginia Woolf’s favorite word. They wrote the songs that spilled out of their fifth grade CD player, with awful lyrics, but it somehow perfectly described what they needed to describe, “When are you going to realize it was just that the time was wrong?” The writing was ugly, but it was truth, and so it was beautiful. The writing soon leaked from the walls onto the ceiling and the floor, and then it was even more confining and freeing to you, standing in the middle, the words began shouting to one another, and answering one another, Marco Polo style, although the authors of the words had never met.
“I wore that dress for you!”
“I didn’t ask for all this.”
They hadn’t met, well, I suppose they hadn’t met until now, because their words shot off the wall and became acquainted, exchanged small talk and asked one another what their major was, like a couple of awkward college students.
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