Scribbles on the Soul

It was written in black Sharpie on the slanted wall above the dirty bathroom stall. The bar smelled stale and musty and the restroom was a tiny, one-roomed space with a creaking wooden door for privacy. I hovered above the toilet seat, protecting my butt from the disease infested fate it would surely meet if I were to sit down. With my elbows pressed into my knees for support, my eyes wandered to the cracked tile space above me and I saw the writing on the wall... literally.

It is enough that you are alive

Just outside the door and down the stairs the bar was full of mid afternoon activity. It was the height of college basketball playoffs and the old tvs mounted to the walls showed the games the people had come to see. I could hear cheering and laughter, the soundtrack of celebrating permeating the Sunset Boulevard haunt. But the noise and the excitement felt faraway from the walled off corner of the building I found myself in. The floor was littered with toilet paper and trash. There was a tiny window that revealed a sweeping view of Los Angeles, if only one was tall enough to see out it. I was. After I pulled up my panties and let my dress fall back down around my ankles, I looked out that window at the city I call home.

I felt a sadness in my heart with an explanation I couldn't pinpoint. Was it loneliness? How could it be? I was here with a friend, just down the stairs sitting on the sunny front patio, waiting with a margarita and a smile. Yet.... there was the heaviness sitting square on my chest, making it hard to move from this spot at the window. My eyes shifted from the square view to the broken tile containing the wisdom,

It is enough that you are alive

I read it again and again and wondered about the person who wrote it and the space they were in. Was it a message to the lonely souls who seemed to pervade this town? Or a mantra meant for herself made real only through the permanence of scrawling it on a wall in black marker?

I looked once more at the graffiti and I realized that my eyes had imagined something that wasn't there.

Is it enough that you are alive

The words transformed from a statement of hope, a reminder of gratitude to a question of purpose- an existential pondering I hadn't read right.

I had made it something it was not. And what I was left with was writing on a wall for which I had no answer.