Graffiti : Alex Johnson
Everything is nothing, nothing is everything, and you will find nothing nowhere.
THEY WERE ALWAYS there, those words, scrawled in green permanent marker on the eggshell drywall. Every time I’d go to take a piss: everything is nothing.
And this wasn’t the only poop-room philosophy I was forced to swallow over and over again at that urinal. Below it, someone had scratched Shut the fuck up, no one knows shit anymore. A man more resolute than I had gouged out the line, but the chisel marks only accentuated the profundity of the statement.
Other frozen quips stood boldly on that wall.
You hold the future in your hand.
Greeny holds the future in his mouth.
I have a lot to say.
I wondered who you, Greeny, I were, as I stood there in front of that white porcelain wall unit. Sometimes I imagined that they were singling me out, that they had been expecting me. But those messages weren’t for me alone--they were for all of us: my roommate, Steve, my next-door neighbor who smoked a hookah in bed, the guy down the hall who was a little too vocal at night with his girlfriend. Some sharpie-armed poet hid among our ranks. Or more likely, it was a whole band of anonymous attention-monger who put their half-developed indictments, revelations, and retorts up on that tablet for all to see.
And it was comforting, really. Like an inside joke that you always forgot you and your brother had. Oh yeah. It was love, at least as much as can be shown in a men’s bathroom, where the chunks of vomit still sitting on the lip of the toilet could have come from any one of us, and the rank mixture of shower and shit ruined the taste of all our toothpaste.
Sometimes I’d throw back a witty response in my head: No, very few people do know about the process within their own bodies that produces human excrement. Sometimes I even made plans to physically join in the conversation myself, but my inclination against defacing public property stayed my hand every time.
I went into the bathroom yesterday, in pain from holding it for so long. I found nothing. The wall was clean--no marker, no pen. I wondered how long ago the job had been done, whether I just hadn’t noticed for the past day, week, month. But I would have known. I would have felt empty as I did now, staring at nothing. Well, it was almost nothing. The only markings left on the wall were the ones scratched in:
Shut the fuck up, no one knows shit anymore.
Love you too. I love you too.
Alex Johnson is currently a writing student at Northland College in Ashland, Wisconsin. He grew up in St. Louis, MO, where he gained a fine appreciation for toasted ravioli and frozen custard. He believes that within the Midwest lies the solution to all world problems.