I walk through Clark Street, looking for words on brick walls—words or names or phrases or acronyms or shapes, doodled faces and characters on doors and windows. Through cracking layers of peeling paint left by a ceaseless battle between roller and spray can, the newly sprayed dwellers of the street gather and greet. TZO. DogToy. Poet. Huey. When I walk through Clark Street, the words ask me: what is it that drives people, universally, to want to put a piece of themselves out onto a building, a door, a surface? Universally because, surely, it isn't one person covering the walls of each city. It’s something people just do. When I turn the corner, the wall glances at me through a simple outline of an eye in white chalk. It reminds me of Harry.

…

In the first year when I moved to the city, the streets felt desolate and my loneliness rampant. I looked out to buildings through my bedroom window, scanning for brightly lit apartments to spot someone’s mere existence in the city embodiment of a bizarre stranger. I could never seem to find a convincing way to introduce myself; my every attempt was exiled back into the void of confounding unfamiliarity. No matter the amount of time passing by, we couldn’t find a way to understand each other. Each building looked through me as if I was but the gust of wind blowing the laughs of friends I envied in the street. For months, I was imperceptible. I was the sound of this candle’s dim flame.

         Although we were far from ever knowing — or liking— each other, the city and I had a mutual friend. Outside the shop, he sits on an upside-down bucket, legs crossed with a cigarette in hand, elbow perched on his lifted knee. When I first met Harry, his beard was long and white, sometimes braided, the rest of his hair in a wise bun. His moustache swooped outward like a grey hat for his wide smile. In his paint-stained clothes, he showed me around his dépanneur which was really an art studio dressed up as a convenience store. Stacks of his geometric, colourful, experimental paintings rested on the tops of canned soup and bottles of cheap wine. A tall wooden easel sat on the paint-splattered floor, near the drink section hidden in the back. I had probably come in after hearing the alluring ring of his greetings to each person strolling by, as if they were all an old friend he had been longing to see again. The city loved him.

I marvelled at his prolific creativity, and he enthusiastically showed me around each corner. Every canvas my hand grazed or my eyes met he ecstatically plucked from the shelf, unravelling the narrative of his experiments, or what he had realized to get the spontaneous blend of colour he had never expected. With each visit, random objects scattered across the shop became subjects of my inquiry and he would pick them up as if to revive them from a deep sleep, recounting to me their past lives, or playing a tune from curious instruments I had never seen before.

         My insatiable curiosity and excruciating solitude relentlessly drove me to prompt him further, our conversations intermittently interrupted by the slight jingle of the bell above the door and a Hey man! How’s it going? Long time no see brother! I told him about my own paintings but how it had been months since I’d felt a drop of inspiration. Like the city, my apartment was foreign to me. The bright white walls looked at me with unease as if they were waiting for me to make some sort of small talk. And we would all sit in the uncomfortable silence for weeks. A visitor overstaying her welcome. 

During what I remember to be one of the first few visits to Harry’s, I picked up a canvas that was faced down, stacked on top of an energy drink fridge. Strokes of simple orange, blue, and purple lines in the shape of an eye in a tasteful blend of brush strokes and spray paint. I asked how much, he gave me a modest price, and I quickly went home to hang it in my white apartment. The walls loved him too.

         It must've been in the first few weeks since I had moved to Clark Street, that I was almost out the door of his shop when he offered me a spot in his meditation circle he led on Saturdays with his neighbours at the park. It was a casual comment; he didn’t know that it was the first invitation I’d gotten in months. I immediately turned around and asked for the time, place, location. I strode home, a spring in my step, to the white walls that. thanks to him, had finally started warming up to me.

         After a particularly long chat one night and maybe even a chess game, I stayed until he closed up shop. I saw him unfold two wooden panels over the doors on our way out and he told me he commissioned graffiti artists from New York to paint some life into them. I had never really thought much about graffiti until years later when my friend Nevin explained to me the intricacies of what tags mean to those in the graffiti community. He told me what little details can signify and how you can notice the same tags—words, names, letters—over and over again through the city. I've started to walk with my eyes studying buildings, scanning overhead to look for the spray paint on walls every time I leave my apartment.

…

Since my first encounters with Harry years ago, the city, my apartment, and I have become inseparable. I’ve become so familiar with each shop, each street, and each corner, that noticing a layer of the city I had never considered enchanted me. I started noticing recurring words in different places —TZO, DogToy, Poet, Huey — on the top of tall buildings, written small on fire escapes, sprayed tiny on doors. Other than the scavenger-hunt-rush I get from trying to spot the same ones repeatedly, what fascinates me most is the human impulse behind the lines on each building. The same way I always wonder about the people who write in bathroom stalls.

When I walk down Clark Street and look for those tags that I now recognize, I wonder if it’s a way to see yourself in the city. A sort of insistent declaration of existence; that perhaps looking up at the tallest building and seeing a trace of my existence in huge letters years ago would’ve made me feel like somehow the city and I weren’t such separate, opposed beings. That my humanness somehow belonged among the bricks and the concrete. That flesh and cement were a natural occurrence and that leaving my forest-enveloped home was the right thing to do.

What I wonder on my walks now, is if perhaps the walls tell us things we can’t hear. Where my dad grew up, in the outskirts—or banlieue—of Paris, graffiti appears the more the city is forgotten about. Or rather, the more the people in the city are ignored. The more I see tags appear in the city, the more I think graffiti tells us something about our human nature. It tells us of the human impulse to want to be remembered or immortalized in some tangible way by the places we inhabit—to attain a semblance of permanence. To leave a trace of an existence. The way people carve their names on benches, or their combined initials with a new lover into trees to make the possibly transient into something surely enduring. Like those heart locks on bridges.

I wonder if it is this feeling of imperceptibility that is writing on the walls. In places where people feel the least heard or the most seen through, do people want to decorate the city like a forbidding home? Like the white walls of a foreign apartment? To identify with a place that doesn’t look at them? Maybe invisibility demands us to pay attention to the things we see but don’t notice, led by the anguish of our own quiet existence, as something often looked at but not seen. Just like words written on the walls; we see people we don’t notice all the time. But maybe the city, through its ignorance, begs you to notice.

To notice Harry, Poet, and everything that hides in plain sight. To walk making eye contact with the walls, the trees, the buildings, the people. To search not for the traces left but for the existence of the people leaving them. To notice in the city perhaps means becoming a (very visible, in the middle of a public park) regular practicer of the ancient Chinese art of Qigong with about 5 of your middle-aged neighbours and the unofficial mayor of Clark Street.