The Wall

A white wall stretches out in front of me. It reaches out in both directions as far as I can see. It towers over everything, ominously looking down upon my diminished self. I think I might be able to see the top, but it really could go on for ever and I could just be tricking my mind into seeing the vertical end of the wall.

I need a way to pass to the other side of the barrier. It is an urgent matter, I remember, but the reason now escapes me. The surface of the wall is smooth, unblemished, and flawless. I was hoping to find footholds with which to climb, but there is nothing to be had. The ground too, is impassible, as it is frozen solid into stone. Instead I begin to walk along the wall to the left. The wall cannot possibly go on forever.

The whiteness of the wall continues as far as the wall does. It stays the same untouched colour, never changing and never fading. Soon it begins to blur, creating gray spots in my vision and begins to affect my balance. The white is too repetitive and hypnotizing. I start seeing other colours too now, blues and reds and yellows, all blending together in my vision, coloring the dull world. I know the visions are just in my head, but my mind has become reality.

And the wall continues on.

Paint

We paint our walls to cover up the ugly colours underneath. We paint them to cover up the dirt and imperfections. We cannot replace them easily, so we paint to hide what we wish to replace. In the same way, I believe we paint the old walls which are ourselves.

The dirt we cover up is the filth built up from living in and using the room in our daily lives. It is only natural that we have that evidence of the life that has gone on there. However, we are told that we must always be perfectly clean.  We could clean the walls of course, but that would take much more time than we are willing to spend. So we cover it with a fresh new coat of paint. But the dirt is still there and more dirt will build up on top of the new paint.

Sometimes we wish we could tear down the walls entirely and start with new ones. We believe that change like that will change the entire makeup of the place in which we live. Not many of us have that luxury to rebuild however. Instead, we choose a new colour for the walls and pretend that they are entirely new. Of course, we know that is not the truth, but we tell ourselves to believe. We imagine that the old walls no longer exist.

The holes in the walls are the hardest to fix. We patch them up with something much weaker than than the material it started out with. The patch is made of something different, and will never be quite the same as everything around it. Society tells us that we must hide the fact that we had that hole to fix in the first place. So we paint over it. But the hole is still there. It simply hides beneath another layer of paint.

My Future

I want to be an artist.

I want to paint the canvas that is the world. I want to tug at people's heartstrings and make them care about things they never even knew existed. I want to show the world the beauty that can be found in the most mundane of places. I want to explode in a blast of colours and words, pictures and poems, thoughts and dreams. I want to create a new world from the fountain of my mind.

I want to help the world learn to see.