Walls are a part of our lives in one way or another. There are the walls of your home and then there are the invisible walls people put up to close off the world. Both have the same distinction to protect a person from intruders.
When I was 14 years old, there was an enclosed tunnel made out of cement that I had to walk through everyday to get to school. The typical teenage writing was on it’s walls with some girl writing her undying love for some guy. It was a mystery to me that someone would want to be writing about love on a cold, damp wild wall. Yet here I was captured each day by its graffiti. There was no way to walk around it. It was the only way to school.
Reminded by my conscience that writing on a wall is destroying someone’s property, I never engaged in this activity. I did not want to wrangle with words that someone else would read anyway. It seemed pointless and leads to someone reading useless crap. Yet I wanted to write something, but not empty chatter as was the case with 90% of what was written on those stone walls.
One particular day I stopped as I was exiting the tunnel and said to the walls, “Give me 14 more years and I will show you something!” I then turned away from that tunnel to never walk through it again. It was my last day of junior high school.
As I have aged my childhood now holds some sacred truths. I learned that writing is good even if it is graffiti. Here I was a lonely girl holding on so long ago to those walls. They became a part of me without even understanding their impact. Every 14 years in fact I have taken stock of what I could show those walls.
Local newspaper clipping from my teenage years playing softball. Childhood memories are so important to who we become later in life.
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