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.