On Leaving Messages
There is a note written in biro (I realise now that it is technically graffiti, but the sweetness of the message compels me to call it a note) it sits on the nearest traffic light to my flat and reads as follows: “I <3 Alex + I’d move 2 Manchester with her!” Every time I see this I wonder if they did, or indeed have in fact, moved. I wonder what their relationship is and I hope that it is going well. I wonder what compelled them to leave this message. If it was left as a spur of the moment dedication, with Alex there beside them, carving their decision into stone. Or maybe they regularly cross this road with Alex, and on their walk to work or university, or home, they hoped to point it out to her and make her day. Almost like affordable skywriting. Maybe they left it here because Alex lives in the southside, and this traffic light is in the west end, and they know Alex would never see it, let alone think it was about her, but they needed an outlet, somewhere they could acknowledge their feelings publicly, yet also to themselves. Like a promise. “I <3 Alex + I’d move 2 Manchester with her!”
Is that something you have ever wanted? Isn’t that an interesting feeling? The desire to do something publicly, outward to the world, that only you could possibly understand the significance of.
In December 2019, there was an exhibition at the Millennium Gallery in Sheffield about Time. As part of this, people were encouraged to leave a note on a wall surrounding the prompt “What does time mean to you?” People left notes like ‘Time waits for no man!’ and simply ‘Entropy’. I also left a note. At the time, I was falling in love with one of my friends, and it occupied a lot of space in my mind. I left a note that read “I love them, but I am running out of time to say”. I took a photo of all these notes about time, with mine in the top corner, and posted it on my Instagram. I wondered if anyone would be able to recognise my handwriting, but I doubted it. I met this friend at university, but we were both from around Sheffield, so I thought there was some chance they would see it over the Christmas holidays. Yet, even if they did, they would never know I wrote it, or that it was about them. Years later I found out they had seen that exhibition, I told them about this, and they thought that it was funny.
And it is, it is funny. It’s funny how I felt the need to do that. What a hyperbolic and performative statement. It isn’t really for anyone other than me, and yet, there it was. For everyone to see. There’s something to the anonymity of that. I suppose it was for other people in that the idea of people reading a statement like that, I thought people would find it entertaining or dramatic, and there is no real consequence in that it is not a message in independence. It was a personal response to a prompt about time, just like the rest of them. I hoped that people would’ve read my message and reflected themselves about their own desires in relationships. Though I suppose when I wrote it, I was simply thinking, what if I run out of time?
Are we leaving messages enough these days? What does that look like in our daily lives?
Sometimes, my dad sends me newspaper clippings - the film and arts sections. I can imagine him skimming them and making his notes and highlights. I see him doing this passively, without much effort but with silent care. In the What’s On Film section, he has highlighted “Rebel Dykes” “Shame” and “Ant-Man”. I think he is perhaps the only person in the world who could look at such a broad spread of films, and circle those three. Besides Shame, he adds three ticks. Which I assume is to be taken as a strong recommendation from him. I see this selection as a metric of what my dad suspects I would like. Rebel Dykes, Shame, and Ant-Man. Probably a better estimate than what I could’ve hoped for.
I think of this exchange as a new kind of masculinity. How it’s funny, that one man in a different country will open a paper at his kitchen table - the picture of traditional masculinity - Coffee, Paper, Fry-Up. He makes these notes, and will send them on to his artsier, queer son. (That said, I know that coffee is coming with an oat milk, that paper is the guardian and that fry up is vegan. The apple maybe doesn’t fall so far from the tree.) I open my dad’s excerpts at my own kitchen table, in my overpriced flat that I rent, whilst I think about how my dad has circled what’s playing on TV this week, when I don’t pay a TV license. But I know it’s not about that. I like reading this because my dad will leave a note to wish me well and include a loose scratch card he’ll hide from my mum that I never win, and I know that he only sends any of this in the first place because once, in a letter I wrote back, I told him the first time he wrote to me it made me so happy.
Me and my dad call occasionally, but we mostly communicate through photos of our days in a family group chat. But no-one reading this is thinking why would you write to each other when you can call or text, everybody knows that it is a different feeling.
How do you message people? I imagine a lot of it is instantaneous. Which, don’t get me wrong, there is nothing wrong with, but it is a different kind of message.
I’m thinking about how I speak to my friends now. How much it varies, the connections I try to maintain and what those mean. With one of my best friends, I realise that outside of group chats in which we are both active, we sort of treat each other as passers-by, reaching out only when either of us immediately recognise something that must be shared with the other. It’s funny how much prefacing and warm regards we give to the people we barely know, compared to the frivolousness with which we address those closest to us. I believe it comes from a place of knowing that our kind of intimacy is unwritten.
In writing this, I can see I’ve been attempting to define a type of moment. To isolate these vignettes of life that I don’t think to write down as they happen, but are composed in my mind like scenes. All the ways I think of messages and how I move through them.
My friends recently concluded a late morning radio show they presented weekly, for four years. The show was called Mixed Feelings, and there was an eponymous segment at the shows midpoint (11am) where they would ask about everyone’s mixed feelings for that week. Listeners would share their responses by messaging into the radio station’s chatroom, anonymously or under an alias, and the hosts would share their own.
When using a dating app, the process of deleting and re-downloading, to see if anyone has messaged you.
Hearing my flatmates play their instruments and picking up my own. I’ve noticed that when someone plays, another soon follows. Not to play together, but to be inspired to play. We all do this unconsciously, turn in turn.
In Elden Ring, the game has an inbuilt messaging system were players can leave annoynmous messages for other players to find. The messages are comprised of a series of pre-selected terms the player can choose from. These are upvoted or downvoted by players depending upon their perceived relevance. There is a common puzzle in the game where the player is tasked with finding three turtles. Players will leave hints in the form of these messages directing you towards a turtle’s location. But in the messaging system, there is no word for turtle, so it has been unanimously agreed that the replacement word, is “Dog”
When I managed a bar, there was a customer who would come in on Friday between 3:15 and 4. Whilst he waited for his daughter to finish violin lessons, he would have a half pint of Pilsner, and talk to me about the films he had watched that week. I believe he encouraged me to watch Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, now one of my favourite films. And I remember printing out empty receipt paper to make notes of our reccomendations to one another.
Next time you have the chance, draw something in the sand, or scrawl something in the dust of your neighbours van. When you PayPal someone, think about the message you send it with. Pin something on your fridge. Anything. Message in a bottle. Imagine how insane it would feel to receive a message in a bottle. You’d go wild.