I Found a Poem in the Wall of My Childhood Home
Written in pencil, behind the wallpaper, by a teenager who lived there first.
We were renovating my childhood bedroom, stripping forty-year-old wallpaper, when I found the poem. It was written in pencil on the plaster, in a teenager's handwriting, and it was dated 1978.
The poem was not good. It was about the ceiling and the way the light came through the window and the feeling of being sixteen and wanting to be anywhere but there. But it was real, and it was on the wall of the room I had slept in for eighteen years, and I had never known it was there.
I sat on the floor of my old room and I read it, and I understood that the room had belonged to someone else before it belonged to me. A teenager who had felt the same way I had felt, who had wanted to be anywhere but there, who had written a poem about the ceiling because the ceiling was the only thing they could see.
I didn't strip it. I framed it. I cut a square of plaster out of the wall and I put it in a frame and I hung it in the hallway, next to the photos of the house when it was new.
The teenager who wrote it would be in their sixties now. I don't know who they are or where they went or whether they still write poems. But they wrote one on the wall of my room, and I found it forty years later, and it made me feel less alone in a room I thought was mine alone.
I wrote a poem on the wall too, in the same pencil, on the same plaster. The next person who strips the wallpaper will find both of them, and they will know that two people, forty years apart, felt the same way in the same room, and wrote it down where only the wall could see it.
By Team Writory, for Writory.
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