Walls need friends too
In my old room at my parents’ house, I have a very special wall. Quite a large wall, and apparently one that is pretty sturdy, as it happens to be able to hold all of my memories from a period of three years on it, securely attached to it with various colours of tape. These memories come in the form of pictures from the prettiest moments of my life, receipts from memorable dinners or the equally memorable trips to the supermarket, as well as different kinds of doodles and paintings from one of those quiet and dimly lit nights. There are, of course, also dried leaves that were once colourful, tiny cat stickers and a chicken poster with ten of the most common breeds of chickens and roosters on it. I swear, it's prettier than it sounds.
A little over a year ago, it was time to tape the last thing to it. I don't know if you'll believe me, but it's because the wall was all tape and no wall anymore. It was full! What is probably easy to believe, is that this resulted in me having to find a new apartment, with a new wall to fill. After lots of searching and careful consideration, I found an apartment with a wall. A wall that was double the size of the original wall. Now, I haven’t been half as ambitious with taping things to it, but I do wonder what kind of a life it has. I wonder what it knows about me. More so, I wonder what it thinks about and what it feels, as I continue adding things to it, little by little.
Life was quite lonely at first as a wall. Sure, I was accompanied by the specks of dust that hung tightly onto the little mishaps in the paint job, but it wasn't much. They never said anything to me, only focused on tightly holding onto me so that they wouldn't fall down to the floor. I can't quite tell how long I lived like this, nor do I really want to remember it in the first place. You know how awfully lonely being lonely can get, don't you?
One day, I woke up from one of my naps and felt weird. I felt heavier, almost like the wind had come and blown all of the dust in the world on me. I opened my eyes warily and started slowly taking in what I saw. "Meow," the tiny, yet fluffy, kitten said to me. It was probably the saddest meow I had ever heard, granted I hadn't heard any before in my life. On the same post-it note that the cat was drawn on, there was a warmly lit birthday candle neatly placed on a small birthday cake. I couldn't imagine why the kitten was sad, after all, it had a birthday cake, something that I had personally never had. "What's wrong little kitty?" I asked my new friend. I saw tears glimmering in the corners of its eyes. "None of my friends came to my birthday party," it whispered. "Oh, I'm sorry," I said, "maybe they'll come a little later."
The kitten never stopped waiting for its friends, and after one sad animal, others began to appear too. The second one to arrive was a sad raccoon, who sat outside a house, leaning against a door, almost completely folded into itself. It told me how the family that had sometimes given it a piece of bread, some grapes and even some cotton candy, had recently moved away. The raccoon missed them and said its tummy had started to hurt and make a weird rumbling sound. The sound always startled him. The third and fourth to arrive were a sad hedgehog and a sad baby chick. The latter had a broken egg next to it, and the former never told me anything, just rolled up into a ball, a spiky ball.
It seemed like I was the only one that was even a bit happy, after all, I had some company now. Thankfully, at around Christmas, we got two Christmas cards to join us, one with a snowman and one with a squirrel wearing a pointy red hat. They were merry people, those two. Always smiling, cracking some jokes here and there. Their eternal Christmas caroling did start to get a bit too much a bit too quickly though. Then, one morning, they had left. Hadn't even said goodbye, which seemed to sadden the sad animals even more. I found their departure understandable, after all, it was almost springtime.
Then it got quiet again. Whoever was attaching these things to me, didn't do so anymore. I do wonder where the person went. I blamed the sad animals for a while. After all, who would want to tape things next to them, with them always complaining and whining, and never listening to anything anyone had to say? Oh, I know. I can't take it out on them, my only friends. They don't need to know the weight of realizing someone's forgotten about you all of a sudden, when they were the one who remembered you for the first time. It helped, thinking that perhaps the person was just taking a very long nap, just like I do whenever I feel lonely enough for it to hurt, whenever the pain weighs my heart and lungs down enough to make it hard for me to breathe, whenever I hope to find someone to tell about it in my dreams. It helped, thinking that maybe the bright sunlight that comes with springtime would wake the person up, "wake up, wake up?"
Then the light-pink, heart-shaped post-it notes started to appear. Whenever one did, I felt some weird, warm and dark-pink blush start to rise to my previously colourless cheeks. ”Have a nice day darling!", "Good luck on your first day at work!", or my favourite, "Love you so much!". It was the first time anyone had told me they loved me. And whoever it was, started doing it often. Now, some of the notes I received didn't quite make sense to me, but I can't expect the one writing these to know everything about me, when I don't even know who they are, right? I can't quite describe how the notes made me feel, but I do know that I felt good, warm, and like it could make my heavy heart lighter. Like summer brought days, even nights, filled with yellow and orange light.
The notes brought a new friend with them. It was sitting in the middle of a beautiful blue piece of paper, an orange cat, as round as a bean. It had a flower growing in front of it, maybe it had brought it for me. It followed me everywhere. Not that I could go anywhere, but it kept me company like none of the other animals had ever done. It told me about the bugs that liked buzzing around the flower and about the occasional mouse that would run across the paper. I told it things about my life too. About how I had woken up to the sound of the baby chick tippy toeing around its post-it note, about how I couldn't fall asleep because of the excitement from the love notes, about how I didn't want to take a nap because I liked listening to its stories so much. They made my light heart feel like it could fly to meet the orange sunlight in the morning.
