Last night the never ending work on the F train forced me to take a detour to downtown Brooklyn en route to Manhattan. Instead of taking a snail paced, herky-jerky shuttle bus, which always leaves me dizzy and impatient, I begrudgingly decided to take the half hour walk. I carried flowers and a bottle of wine for a friend's birthday dinner, sweat in my purple wool coat, and sighed loudly as I stomped.
But then I came upon these words, this wall. The rainbow colored dreams of downtown Brooklyn.
...go to Paris.
...be a teacher.
...have a happy life.
...make music.
Thousands upon thousands of endings to one unfinished sentence: Before I die I want to...
It stopped me. It made me think. If I only had one piece of chalk, one fill-in-the-blank space to keep a no longer secret wish, what would I write?
What would you write?
A little more about the Before I Die project by artist Candy Chang:
It’s easy to get caught up in the day-to-day and forget what really matters to you. With help from old and new friends, Candy turned the side of an abandoned house in her neighborhood into a giant chalkboard where residents can write on the wall and remember what is important to them. Stenciled with the sentence “Before I die I want to _______”, the wall became a space where we could learn the hopes and dreams of the people around us.
