Daubed in timeless town

I need to go to Paris in the spring­time. I am under strict self-instruction to search the alleys and back streets, just as the winter chill is turn­ing to mild warmth and the rain­drops chan­ging from spit­ting to sooth­ing. I need to solve a mys­tery. My mis­sion is to find a mes­sage left for me, even because of me, some years before.

Call it an occa­sional obses­sion, if you like. I am occa­sion­ally obsessed, after all. In between times, I am just con­stant in my obsess­ive nature. But you know that already.

Where do I want my words to appear? On a page, on a screen, in broad­sheet or in tabloid? Maybe on a head­stone? Mark as none of the above, not at this moment. No such ambi­tion for me, because I am in search of some­thing sim­pler, some­thing more solid. A wall. Bricks and mor­tar. For I know that down an anonym­ous, half-forgotten Parisian street in a corner of the city are sprayed the words that were writ­ten by me, read by oth­ers and daubed by two. An act of van­dal­ism in one fluor­es­cent sentence.

Maybe two sen­tences. I for­get. This was years ago, and many other words have drif­ted in and out of my con­scious­ness since then. Fool­ishly, I never kept that informal request for me to grant such an infringe­ment of my unspoken and unclaimed copyright.

He told me that a phrase I had writ­ten — almost unthink­ing, just a final line attempt­ing to pull together some shift­ing, form­less para­graphs that would oth­er­wise have reached no sat­is­fact­ory con­clu­sion — had become his new motto. A new prin­ciple by which to live his life. Here’s a strange one, I thought.

He told me that he was going to buy an aer­o­sol can of gar­ish hue and spray the words along the grimy wall of a busy but dimly-lit alley­way — a pop­u­lar short­cut from here to there. Exclus­ive, known only to those for whom the city streets fol­lowed a maze-like course through the pores on the back of their hand. If only I had enquired as to where here and there were, I might have been able to guess the loc­a­tion. Here’s an odd one, I thought.

His girl­friend would keep lookout whilst he star­ted on the extreme left of the brick wall and hissed his way quietly, under the blanket of dark­ness, to the right. A sprayed full stop would mark the sud­den end of this moment of verbal dis­obedi­ence. I’m relieved that he didn’t sug­gest an exclam­a­tion mark, for I wouldn’t like to have cen­sored his act of rebel­li­ous cre­ativ­ity by deny­ing him his glor­i­ous punc­tu­ation. Here’s a pecu­liar one, I thought.

I need to go to Paris. My French is no more than rusty, long-forgotten O-level in stand­ard. If he trans­lated my words into his nat­ive tongue, then dis­cov­ery will be vir­tu­ally impossible. Can I really stop passing ped­es­tri­ans and ask them to trans­late graf­fiti into Eng­lish? Yet if I never find the wall in ques­tion, if I never set eyes upon the sprayed-on scrawl for myself, then I will remain forever uncon­vinced that this extraordin­ary epis­ode actu­ally happened.

I want to be writ­ten on your city walls, under moonlight.