"I was 'ere...are you?" - observations on desk graffiti

A view on the walk home from uni...what else are you walking away from?

Dashed and weathered by the tides of pens, pages, coats and elbows, their corners buffed into curved polish, their grains ground up with inks and dents of procrastination past.

The raring expectancies of lives beginning lies in these boards- illustrations of the subconscious, thoughts left too long un-tethered in those fragmented pauses between interest and understanding. Like the murk of an evening skyline, the harder you squint, the more biro constellations rise up through the blotted layers. Some wet black with fresh passion or distraction. Some softer- etches waning and wearing away; void and forgotten like the emotion, long since spent, that carved it there.

There are lessons learnt here, offered to us to make our own- it’s odd, both how often the word ‘time’ pops up, and how much there is etched out in English. A lolling scrawl simply suggests, “Take the Time”, another preaches, “time is something in your hands”, while here is scratched the sullen mumble, “kill the time that’s killing you”. There is an excitable, and as far as I can make out from the Italian, fairly derogatory comment about Gwen Stefani, and a few regulation doodles of penises. Some sketches are cruel, some are merry, some loving, some pondering, some make no sense at all- and why should they?



Except...I’m drawn (no pun intended) to a certain few patches of bleached scribbles- despite their age, and their bolder gel-pen successors, I find myself dwelling on them. Wondering if they hold on, in dull defiance, because they hold true, even now, though their authors long since left these pews behind. Their tattered messages are distant, but held here in purgatory, with dogged insistence. Do they stay loyal, somehow, to a dream never realised, a passion never chased, a love left untold? What do they say that their owner could not?



What have you written? Or, more importantly, do your thoughts live on, spectre-like on some desk gone by- shady reminders of a bottled desire? And don’t you think it’s time you let those laboured lines fade away....



Slightly less insightful graffiti, on the Literature Faculty wall

 (if you're bored, leave me a comment below. because...well, I like them :) )