Fresh paint

 

There are workers in the halls, smacking ladders against walls, drilling imaginary holes, smoking stale cigarettes. Gone for the day, I see a slathering of red paint on the walls. The floor signs are randomly taped over, but the spaghetti tangle of phone and tv wires have been lost in the process. It will all be painted over, another layer of some color. This is the life of old walls. They have no choice in this. Just a new skin to be scribbled on, where people will smash out cigarette butts, where someone might lean in and be kissed, where fingers may drag going down the stairs so slowly. 

I walked all of the way to the ATM and back last week, more then 12 kilometers. It was my first time out of our neighborhood in months. At the train station, there were piles of bricks and a forest of barriers to navigate. The sidewalk by this station is ripped up almost every year, and stones go down once again as people weave around the workers. It seems that the moment the latest round is done, everything is ripped up the very next day and the process begins again, dragging along for months and months. Why the stones are never right, we will never know. Who sells these bricks, we will never know. But who pays for them, that is easy. We pay for bricks that are not right, that need to be broken down and carted off. The face of the sidewalk never remains, it just gets a new haircut, a clean shave - but never the right one.

In Spring, men will stand with foul-smelling cans of paint and put a fresh coat on low fences across the city. Primary yellow and green, red and blue on every playground. Their faces are blank, staring off into the new grass that springs up. Who this paint will help, it is hard to say. Does it do any harm? Does it manufacture some odd, false hope? I think it does nothing at all. The same fences are underneath it all, the same dirt beneath those bricks, the same walls outside our door no matter what color they carry tomorrow.