Let me tell you about burnt orange paintings of wine bottles and hanging guitars whose heads are held by five hooks on a length of black wood. Let me tell you about magazine page after magazine page ripped from their bindings and tacked on college students' walls. Let me describe for you the evolution from a snobby resentment to an air of accepting harmony that dog hair in ubiquity leads you through. These are the things that wall our worlds.
Spoon collections, coasters, collages of holiday cards in the shape of christmass trees - our walls document our idiosyncracies. I love that humans try to recreate the quarters of their soul on the dry wall of their homes; it makes judging people that much more convenient. They allow us to foster our addictions to silence, to chaos, to practicality and utter eclectic futility. With their help we can pick our nose in peace and further the dialogues which, if considered technically, would all be considered monologues if that notion wasn't a bit frightening. We can masturbate, and we can put dirty underwear back on, shave our backs in secret and look at dirty pictures of the "wrong" sex. We can recite the same stanza till the words stop bitching. We can be a competitively legitimate hip hop king and project runway queen within minutes of each other. We can consider pizza rolls and a salad "good enough." The walls receive our fists and vases meant for the heads of cheating boyfriends. They wear crayons and poop and the Tonka-sized tracks of obscure farm machinery.
They peer at us in young love's songs, they know our professed count of "days depressed" is an order of magnitude smaller than the truth. They look over us as we grin at our acquired tastes and the company those tastes win for us. Forest green for the wall that holds my lover's back as I lift her skirt with kisses; smokey jazz-club-bar-light-blue for the wall next to the windows where the city always sits. But its not just the walls. Its the throw rug and the pillow that share you with your bed, the lamp that squiggles 'cause you were sick of being straight, the ceiling fan you leave on, even though you're cold, 'cause you have blankets and you like the 'wur.' This is the stuff of settling in, and the stuff of branching out. Sometimes I feel like even though it all doesn't judge me despite it knowing my weakness for ice cream, it would if it could. I wonder if the inhabitants of inantimate cages sooner or later defect to the nature of their walls, or if the stuff of synthetic habitats acquires vitality in discrete acts of jealous theft.
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