We are all and have been someone balancing in a public bathroom at some point. These places have their halo of a forgotten frontier; The tiles of this sink are stained from time and other movements; the mirror barely returns a reflection; It’s like trying to cover up a crime without success.
I don’t know if Bebe Pessoa would have already given those three fixes for San Isidro, but everything was as if still, attached to nothingness, rested and remitted in itself, symmetrical (although not so symmetrical), thickened by the urgent nothingness that occurs there. ; by the coming and going of people who in a matter of seconds give their worst and come out with the same; walking unpunished, sometimes proud, almost always satisfied, all cretins; me included. We are all and have been someone balancing in a public bathroom at some point. These places have their halo of a forgotten frontier; The tiles of this sink are stained from time and other movements; the mirror barely returns a reflection; It is like trying to cover up a crime without success, like covering a dead person with a rug and leaving his feet outside; Everything in here seems to be sustained by the pure will of those who enter and leave.
This place is a dirty poem; a dirty thing from Raymond Carver or Richard Ford, the lie of a non-existent order, a mixture of chlorine and living flesh that only exists in places like this, the door is a mute witness of small tragedies and restrained joys and the walls, ugh !, a disordered, desperate and absent cry, which has its own meaning of message, its content and its grace, when that is, although not always. Depending on the day, they are a painting by Jackson Pollock, the metal sides of a Bronx suburban, a bulletin board – and complaints –, a vomit of absinthe and stroh, violet and black lines etched with posca, a colorful and wild stroke or the Supreme proof that beer is cheap. It is the public confession of someone who does not want to be discovered. What do I know, if it’s just a bathroom, if it’s just a bar.
When I look to the left I read some letters corroded by the years that say “Do you feel capable or incapable?” and below, with new ink and clearly responding to the top line a simple, plain and brilliant “Disabled”. Let’s talk about the graffiti on public toilets. It is necessary, believe me, because I have recently discovered that they are the most excellent and perfect form of human communication. The urge to pee is the same for all of us, so the ecosystem in which the messages are broadcast is, a priorimuch more democratic than saying things face to face with what that implies hierarchically; labeling a tile is shouting into the wind and bottling that air behind a glass that says “break in case of response”, because there are many and varied reasons why one cannot respond: you can’t think of anything, you don’t have a posca either a marker at hand or you’re not drunk enough to enter the rag. In any case, that’s the magic: many variables have to occur at the same time for a message to receive a response, for a rambling inscribed on a wall to find its soul mate.
Below you read that I don’t know who a slut is and right next to it another message that says that, for slut, her father, because these places are also trenches. Here no one pretends, nor disguises their shit in good manners; It is, in a literal sense, a place where things are said half naked, with all that this implies. Another corner in which scribbles pile up like layers of paint, forming an overlapping chronology of collective relief. If you scratch with your fingernails, I’m sure you could find something from ’97 or thereabouts, a green ink heart that says J and L 4everand who knows where J and L are now, if they are still together or alive, or if they simply had mercy on each other and decided not to love each other more than necessary. But here his promise is undaunted, at least until someone comes by with bleach.
You look in the broken mirror, with that tube light that turns your face into a bad memory, and you think about writing something yourself. But what do you say, what do you leave. How do you compete with all this? You button your pants and don’t write anything. Or yes. The choice is up to each one; The only thing that is truly certain is that it doesn’t matter what you say: someone will cross it out, improve it, or tear it to pieces. In here, the only thing that matters is the echo, the certainty that, at least for a moment, someone heard you.
#Whisper #bluebird
