I Hope Your Next Resident Is Kinder To Your Walls

When you were stripping away your walls of the posters and looked at me and asked, “Do you want any of this?” I wanted to tumble down, sink into the floor, travel up the walls, and become the adhesive that stuck onto your posters.

On Wednesday, the day before you leave, we’re having a “clean the wall party” night. Your exposed brick wall is covered with amateur artists from a collection of friends and their girlfriends to actual Memphis graffiti artists making their mark. “I ❤ Max & Lucy” is what stuck out to me initially. Then the bull with blue and pink horns stretched across half the wall that your friend Nathan’s girlfriend made. The random flowers that we hypothesized were Luke’s ex’s, but I found out the night of the Korean BBQ party that it was actually Andrew’s girlfriend, Clara.

When I first came over to your apartment, it was the day after you first arrived in Memphis after summer break. The random Christmas tree on your bookshelf, the circular black container with a copper lizard (which I later found out holds a dollar bill, filter papers, and “hashish”), the posters of a personified cigarette and a middle finger enlarged to say “fuck you” to the man with a beer belly. The “Ed’s Ecstasy” sign above your bathroom door. Cutouts of beer labels on your refrigerator: “Bud is tight” collaged from a bud light box.

You asked me to draw on your wall, so I carefully selected white, pink, and blue from your chalk box that was stolen from the art room at Rhodes College by your friend Joe. I drew a fluffy white cloud that turned into a sheep with an oval face and triangular flat ears. Pigmenting the rugged surface was difficult—spaces of white chalk and the brick were naturally enmeshed. Then I drew mountains, as I knew you hiked the Appalachian trail. Circles, or rings, like targets, as I felt like the beginning of a new relationship was destined to happen.

Then I took a step back and the sheep no longer looked like a sheep besides white ashes in a vague shape, the mountains were a blue “M,” the target maintaining circles within circles. I asked you to guess what it was, and you were unsure.

I wanted to be silly, so I then drew a pink butthole on the sheep and labeled it “Butthole” and asked if you knew what this was. You still didn’t.

The wall adjacent to your brick wall is a blank, damaged canvas with paint scraped from the command strips, exposing the brown layer beneath the painted white wall. You sit as you write your final senior seminar paper for your English degree. I sit as I write my essays for graduate school admissions.

You said you felt bad for your neighbor Peter. Peter heard the walls bang and creak back and forth from the bed every night and sometimes in the morning… midday, depending on how much time we spent together.

The cold exposed brick wall next to your bed is what I held onto as I cried about my knee and palm getting scraped after tumbling down the concrete back to your apartment on Main Street after drinking 10 shots and a whole bottle of wine. That was the only time that you felt genuinely annoyed at me. I didn’t listen to your screams for not crossing the street while cars zipped past. Or kicking the e-scooters down like dominoes. Vandalizing shit.

For the first two months, I had walls up. I didn’t want to tell you parts of my identity that I felt were shameful. For one, I hated talking about family. That was really complicated and a barrier that I felt was necessary, since you had a decent relationship with your mom and dad. Second, I was afraid of getting close to you, knowing that you were graduating and leaving in December.

Walls, while they are separating in meaning, also contain. Walls are what makes spaces and rooms for people. For us, they created a space. A space of creativity and suffocation for vulnerability. I suffocated to tell you about myself, but we were in the same room, crying on the bed, telling each other secrets that we had never told anyone else before.

We were lying in bed one morning, crack of dawn, creating puppet shadow figures on the wall. You made a dog; I made a rabbit.

Walled in, walls out, walls decorated, embellished, walls naked.