They Took Everything I Had

Korean graffiti. It is all over the school. It is on the hallway walls, on the lockers, on the desks, scribbled on the board after every class. Most of it is done in pencil and thus easily washed away with the simple stroke of a washcloth. I turn my attention away from the young Picassos for one minute and immediately regret it upon the dismissal jingle. I tell myself it is harmless. "Greg" with a few Korean letters following it most often in a heart. "Just showing their love" I tell myself. The hallways, lockers, and bathrooms are a different story. The bathroom I have been using at school is a battlefield of Hangul and penises sprawlingly covering an off-white backdrop. I could not escape it, so I began to accept it. Smiling as I wash away the seemlingly harmless graffiti and pictures from the desk. Smirking as I attempt to decipher the meanings while I take a leak. High-fiving a student immediately after she defaces her freshly-cleaned locker whilst tossing her uneaten lunch aside on the grimy floor.

But a few weeks ago I found a haven. The bathroom in the Science Lab area of the school. An ominous area that I rarely ventured into - protected by it's own glass entrance door, dark as night, not a student ever in sight, always a faint odor of sulfur. The English-written "Science Lab" most likely deters students from entering. If there's one thing worse than science, it's science in English. There is, however, a bathroom. A bathroom that no student has appeared to ever enter. Walls as white as Jesus's teeth, floors as shiny as a polished cueball, fake flowers as bright as the sun itself. Not a single scratch of graffiti in sight. For the next few weeks I am gulping water by the gallons in order to have the privilege to relieve myself in these quarters.

That is, until today. My sanctuary has been defiled.


Not only is it graffiti, but it's graffiti directly targeted at me. English graffiti. Someone has caught on to my safe place. If third-floor Science Lab bathroom isn't safe from Korean vandals, I don't know what is anymore.