Little things that make the world feel lived-in

I went to go get vaccinated at an on-campus clinic the other day. It was in a weird spot so we ended up taking a weird route to leave the building on our way out. We came across this one office with glass walls. They had a handful of things written out in dry-erase marker, including a joke of the day. The joke of the day, that day, was nothing. They'd left on vacation earlier this week and left a notice saying that their jokes would return when they got back. It was nice. They could have done nothing, but they didn't.

When school started back up in the fall I noticed one of the four-person dorms had a whiteboard up on their door. It had contact information for the four of them, in case you needed to get in touch. They also had a "poll of the week," and they left a marker hanging nearby so you could leave a tally mark if you agreed with the question. For the first time since maybe my first year of university, I decided to do the same. A week or two later they took down the whiteboard, maybe just because they didn't have the time to maintain it, but I decided to keep mine up. We're now the only people in the hallway with anything like it, besides the residence advisors who are being paid to seem approachable. It's a little awkward, but the space could be empty and I'd rather it wasn't. It's a reminder that real people live here.

A few years ago now, there was this person on campus who would draw these little illustrations of snails on sticky notes and put them up around the residence district. I think the newspaper interviewed them once. They said they just wanted to bring a little bit of positivity into people's lives. Twee, maybe, but nice. They don't let you graffiti the residence buildings; at least, you'd get in a lot of trouble if you tried. You can usually get away with little, impermanent things. Things that'll stick around at least until someone cares to take them down. The snail person inspired me in part to get back into folding cranes. It's like, the one origami pattern I know how to do but that year I was like a machine that eats shitty cafeteria food and outputs paper cranes. I liked writing quotes from books on their wings, and I'd leave them around for others to look at, ignore, take or discard. It was small, but there was something nice about it. It made me feel more present in the space, the space otherwise kept empty by force.

I don't like empty spaces. My home was always a mess when I was a kid. My home is now, as an adult, also a mess. I've spent a good chunk of my life trying to keep places tidy but at some point I gave up. At some point I realized maybe it didn't really matter if my home looked like a picture in an interior design magazine. Maybe what matters is was what it means to me, not what it means to others.¹ I don't really like seeing empty spaces outside my home, either. I often think that a lot of the resistance to things like graffiti is a resistance to people using public spaces in notionally unintended ways. The public benches are not for sleeping; they're for well-to-do people to rest momentarily while out on a walk. The walls aren't for art; they're for… nothing, really. Just separating one space from another. Keeping people out. This "intended" world is mostly just liminal spaces—places to pass from one place to another, never stopping, always moving forward. When someone uses that space in an unintended way, it challenges that notion. It shows those spaces can also be places you live in. And I suppose to some people, that's terrifying, or else why would they spend so much money repainting the walls and kicking people out?

It doesn't have to be spray paint, though. I'm certainly not a graffiti artist. But I do like leaving notes around. I like seeing the posters people put up, whether or not they got anyone's permission to do so. Stickers, paper cranes, sticky notes with twee messages about staying positive. It's a reminder that these are spaces people live in, not just pass through. And there's something special about that.

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