painful words
I took this picture 15 years ago. I was walking home from work, along my usual route, and I saw this piece of graffiti, which had appeared overnight, and it stopped me in my tracks. I remember it made me feel uncomfortable to linger in front of it, I felt like a voyeur witnessing the miserable end of someone's relationship, and I felt very guilty taking this photo and freeze framing their pain and despair. It is such a personal message to Theresa from the wo/man who wrote it and yet it's been very publicly declared. All these years later this kind of thing would pop up in someone's Twitter feed, but back then graffiti was about the only option for posting a message to reach an audience.
Although the graffiti appeared on a wall only two minutes away from where I lived at the time, I had no idea who the people involved were. I have to assume that Theresa lived nearby and would walk past this wall on a regular basis, perhaps this is even the wall of her house, otherwise what was the point of writing it here?
I only recently came across this picture again, buried deep in a folder on my hard drive. And I did spend time wondering whether I should post it or not. Do I have the right to air someone else's dirty laundry, hang their painful history out for all to see? But then I figured that 15 years is a very long time, time enough, perhaps, for this to be ok. And who knows how the story ended. Maybe the mystery author went on to find great happiness with someone else. Maybe this message was a strong enough cry from the heart to make Theresa reconsider her actions and there was a reconciliation between the two of them. It's easy to read Theresa as the villain here, isn't it? She has destroyed someone else's life we're told, but it is only one side of the story. We don't get to hear her side, and there are always two sides. The person who wrote this may have been the one at fault, a real shit who deserved everything that was coming to them, and Theresa made a wise decision, and a brave escape, and perhaps she never looked back and she was the one to go on to find lasting happiness elsewhere.
It's a snapshot of two lives in turmoil, a moment of despair, a fraction of a story that could have turned out far better than this picture suggests. How would you end the story?
Although the graffiti appeared on a wall only two minutes away from where I lived at the time, I had no idea who the people involved were. I have to assume that Theresa lived nearby and would walk past this wall on a regular basis, perhaps this is even the wall of her house, otherwise what was the point of writing it here?
I only recently came across this picture again, buried deep in a folder on my hard drive. And I did spend time wondering whether I should post it or not. Do I have the right to air someone else's dirty laundry, hang their painful history out for all to see? But then I figured that 15 years is a very long time, time enough, perhaps, for this to be ok. And who knows how the story ended. Maybe the mystery author went on to find great happiness with someone else. Maybe this message was a strong enough cry from the heart to make Theresa reconsider her actions and there was a reconciliation between the two of them. It's easy to read Theresa as the villain here, isn't it? She has destroyed someone else's life we're told, but it is only one side of the story. We don't get to hear her side, and there are always two sides. The person who wrote this may have been the one at fault, a real shit who deserved everything that was coming to them, and Theresa made a wise decision, and a brave escape, and perhaps she never looked back and she was the one to go on to find lasting happiness elsewhere.
It's a snapshot of two lives in turmoil, a moment of despair, a fraction of a story that could have turned out far better than this picture suggests. How would you end the story?
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