I parked my car in the side street. It was two in the morning and everything was dark. I grabbed Jake’s BWH cap off the backseat and put it on my head in an attempt to mask my face. I rushed over to the crack; my heart was beating in my chest, but not in a bad way. Not in a way that made me feel panicky, but in a way that made me feel alive and exhilarated. I’d never done anything like this before in my entire life, and a part of me couldn’t believe I was even doing it, but I was.
I pushed the tape aside and put my bag down. Gave one last look around before I opened it and spilled the brushes and cans of paint onto the road. They tumbled out and sounded so loud, like rocks falling over the edge of a cliff. Maybe it was loud because there were no other sounds around; maybe it was loud because all my senses felt heightened. I felt like I was on fire. I could see better, think better, and smell better. There was a buzz and a hiss that felt like it was radiating throughout my entire body, zapping all my cells to life.
I took a deep breath and looked at the hole and crack one last time. It was broken now, but it would grow again. I grabbed the first can of spray paint and shook it. I’d never worked with spray paint before, never even thought to work with it. I’d seen artists use it, so I knew it was difficult, and that there was a technique to it, but for some reason when I’d seen it in the shop and held it in my hand, it had felt as if it was meant to be there. As if I would know what to do with it. And I did.
I squeezed the nozzle and the paint sprayed out, a jet of color into the night. I lowered it to the ground and began. It felt instinctive. Like I’d done this a million times before. The painting flowed through me like the tide, as if I had no control over any of it. It was coming from somewhere else and I was just a conductor tapping into some far-off collective artistic consciousness. The shapes and pictures flowed down my arm, into my hand, and out of the can. I felt this strange combination of being far away from my body but more connected to the world around me at the same time. Connected to all the tiny minutiae: the ant running across the pavement, the small breeze making the leaf move across the street. I was seeing everything all at once, the tiny dots and pieces that make everything up, as well as the bigger picture. Zoomed in and out at the same time as the painting rushed out of me, as I used a combination of spray cans and big brushes with wild abandoned strokes. This was nothing like the art I usually did, but despite that it just tumbled out of me and fell onto the ground. Out of the hole, into the crack, all the way across the road, up the garbage can on the other side. And I felt, I felt . . .
Alive.
In that moment, dirty and paint-stained, on my hands and knees on the side of the road in the middle of the night, I felt more connected to something greater than myself than I’d ever felt before. I felt imbued with a kind of purpose that I didn’t even know I had. Even if I didn’t quite understand what that purpose was exactly, I could feel that what I was doing was important and that it meant something.