I ran it. I wanted to see it again. I cut around back; the symbol was far away, that dry splash on the bottom of the wall. The silvery, fallen-down A—the same one I’d jotted on my hand, on the Halloween scrap paper, those first early days back from Addington, and the same one that was at the Lincoln Center subway stop. Quick as an infielder, I shifted direction to sprint toward it. A tag, Hannah had said. A way to show you’d been here. A territorial mark. Obviously, I’d grown up seeing all kinds of tags, all over the city. I’d just never really paid attention to them. Not till now. Why did I keep finding these tags? They haunted me, but how could Anthony continue to shadow new places I went to, when he was no longer here and couldn’t possibly have known about the direction of my life now? I stared at the mural, willing answers. Defiant but good-humored, the tag also seemed smart-ass—with a dash of lighthearted. I touched the grimy drywall and traced the symbol. The pad of my finger came away blackened.
What do You think about Loud Awake And Lost (2013)?
