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Pompeii burned and got buried in one afternoon, and it kept the walls.
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Under the ash, archaeologists have counted more than eleven thousand pieces of writing scratched and painted on those walls. It is the largest pile of ordinary Latin anybody has ever found.
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Not the emperors. The neighbors.
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Writing It Where He Can See It Is Not the Same as Saying It.
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About three thousand of them are election notices. The rest is the town talking: prices, tallies, jokes, insults, gladiator results, and a very large number about who loves whom. There is a whole book that does nothing but catalogue the love ones.
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The love ones are not in bedrooms.
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They turn up in the places with the most feet in them. Here is where:
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The basilica, the busiest public building in town. |
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The corridor people walked down to get into the big theater. |
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A vineyard wall, where anyone working the rows could read it. |
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The front of a bar. |
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The inside of a house, in the room where guests stood waiting. |
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Every one of those is a place with traffic. Nobody scratched a love message inside a closet. The choice of wall is the entire thing, and the choice was always a wall other people would walk past.
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Some of them got answered. A second hand, a different tool, a line added underneath. On one bar wall somebody wrote that lovers live a sweet life, and underneath, in another hand, somebody wrote that they wished that were so.
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The oldest comment section on earth is a bar wall in a buried town.
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There is also a complaint about the wall itself, a line saying the thing must be near collapse from carrying everybody else’s scribbling. The same line turns up in three separate public spots. Somebody reposted it.
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The digs are still running. Teams in the newer excavations keep pulling more of this writing off the plaster, and the count keeps going up.
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It is not vanity. It is not weakness. It is the oldest move there is, which is to put the feeling somewhere it might get seen instead of somewhere it has to be answered.
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Writing at a person and saying it to a person are two different acts. Only one of them asks for a reply. The other one is a wall, and a wall takes everything and gives nothing back.
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The rule runs the other way too. A like, a view on a story, a song posted where you will find it, a reply to something you wrote nine months ago, none of that is addressed to you. Something addressed to you has your name in it and a day in it.
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You already know which wall you have been writing on, and you already know it does not have a mouth.
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Also True
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From the Ancients
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Japanese kept a word for the thing nobody writes anywhere. Koi no yokan is not love at first sight, which they have a separate word for. It is the sense, on meeting someone, that falling for them is going to happen, later, whether or not anyone does a thing about it. It gets written on no wall. It is one of the few pieces of this whole business that stays inside the person who has it.
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The Mirror
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What did you post last week that you would not have posted if you knew for certain he would never see it?
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Today’s Devotion: Tonight, find the last thing you put online that was aimed at one person and take it down. Then put yourself outside tomorrow evening when the Harvest Moon comes up, with somebody who can hear you.
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Keep your power in your own hands.
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Sofia
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