Two days without sleep.
I came home from the museum today, and the world became a more mysterious place.
I wanted to dive straight into my bleached-white, dorm-smelling bed in university housing. But the drums of crude possibility that sit in our garages are lidless, and the liquid inside is staring back at me. Written over the door to our apartment (in something black, slightly greasy, makeup?):
"I know what you did."
This apartment is filled with guys. It could have been the time I woke up and realized. It could have been Chris, who had a carton of cigarettes delivered by UPS today (and yet, I heard him swear off the things last night, when his girlfriend was over). It could have been the members of UAS' rather pointless fraternity, simultaneously hazing and accepting Jackson. The writing is precise, long, looping - beautiful, in a way. Nothing similar to our cramped, science-student scripts. Black makeup, aesthetic - maybe we pissed off someone with expensive tastes. I stand in the kitchen, looking into the foyer, drinking a cup of coffee out of the sailor's mug I bought at the Sally Ann. The inscription is absorbing, it takes me so many places.
I don't think I had anything to do with this. Maybe none of us did. But stories spin off this thing like sparks from a live wire. I could sit here, crosslegged, for hours, and never cease to speculate. One person's work of a moment will lie, embedded in my memory, for years. When I'm 40, maybe I'll cheat on my wife, and she'll scrawl something on a mirror in black lipstick - and I'll remember this moment. One day I'll walk through burned-out Detroit, spot an agonized bit of graffiti - and remember this moment. We don't know the extent to which our actions can affect other people. Often it is our whims that reverberate most loudly.
I'm going to head up to bed. But I'll spray the graffiti with a whole can of workable fixative, so the rain can't take it off.
I came home from the museum today, and the world became a more mysterious place.
I wanted to dive straight into my bleached-white, dorm-smelling bed in university housing. But the drums of crude possibility that sit in our garages are lidless, and the liquid inside is staring back at me. Written over the door to our apartment (in something black, slightly greasy, makeup?):
"I know what you did."
This apartment is filled with guys. It could have been the time I woke up and realized. It could have been Chris, who had a carton of cigarettes delivered by UPS today (and yet, I heard him swear off the things last night, when his girlfriend was over). It could have been the members of UAS' rather pointless fraternity, simultaneously hazing and accepting Jackson. The writing is precise, long, looping - beautiful, in a way. Nothing similar to our cramped, science-student scripts. Black makeup, aesthetic - maybe we pissed off someone with expensive tastes. I stand in the kitchen, looking into the foyer, drinking a cup of coffee out of the sailor's mug I bought at the Sally Ann. The inscription is absorbing, it takes me so many places.
I don't think I had anything to do with this. Maybe none of us did. But stories spin off this thing like sparks from a live wire. I could sit here, crosslegged, for hours, and never cease to speculate. One person's work of a moment will lie, embedded in my memory, for years. When I'm 40, maybe I'll cheat on my wife, and she'll scrawl something on a mirror in black lipstick - and I'll remember this moment. One day I'll walk through burned-out Detroit, spot an agonized bit of graffiti - and remember this moment. We don't know the extent to which our actions can affect other people. Often it is our whims that reverberate most loudly.
I'm going to head up to bed. But I'll spray the graffiti with a whole can of workable fixative, so the rain can't take it off.