Stranger Than Fiction

Last spring I was temping at a college in the Fenway. I was suffering from a long, drawn-out heartbreak, listening to a gut-wrenching mix on my walkman, and was in sweeping melodrama mode. It was early in the morning, I was feeling the gloom of the entire universe descending on my head, my shirt was itchy, the air was irritating me, I was on the verge of tears, and I tripped out of the train at Fenway. On the sidewalk, directly in front of the open doors, was a perfectly lettered message in red spray paint: I LOVE YOU KRIS.

My heart ripped open as I stood there with the sign between my feet. And I took another step and there was another one, and another one, and on -- a path all the way down the street, each step a proclamation of love. I was floored by this. Mainly because that's my name. Also, considering my emotional state, I was looking for any shred of proof that would make the awful rejection go away. It was the very type of thing that the person causing me heartache would have done -- the cinematic, the ridiculously passionate, the magical.

After a moment, reality sank in and I admitted that the message was not for me. I knew that some other girl would be smiling that morning. But imagine the scene -- this person calculating where their true love would get off the T on their way to work, sneaking around with a hand-made stencil and crouching down in the dark with a red bottle of spray paint. Scrubbing the evidence from their fingers when they got home.

I think about how that person came up with the idea to do that. What happened before that lead them to take such dramatic measures. If the love in question was a new declaration or a wild reinforcement. It's the kind of story that ends up in cloying romance blockbusters like Sleepless in Seattle. And in the movie you get irritated because shit like that is obnoxious and only the stuff of heavy-handed fiction. You think brazen love note graffiti never happens in real life.

I wanted to know how the story unfurled. I wanted to sit and wait to see her come off the T -- she who knew the message was for her. I wanted to see the expression on her face when she stumbled upon the careful stencil. I wanted to see her do more than I could -- stand there with my disposable camera, taking the next shot in my photo-a-day project.