Bathroom Breaks

Part one of a love letter to my favourite city.

One of a few bathroom breaks in a clinically sterile office restroom suddenly felt too cold in the wake of a memory arriving unsolicited and right on time. It called me to a place on the opposite end of the spectrum of public toilets, where instead of clean white tiles and the smell of pine gel, we’re greeted by a stark red (formerly black) mediocre paint job, wearing the stories of many pressed partygoers on its sleeve. You know Kitchener’s, right? Specifically the 2013-2023 era of Kitchener’s Carvery Bar. The second oldest bar in Jozi that was home to the lost, the found, the wandering as well as a few ghosts. That spot on the corner of DeBeer & Juta Street, where the music was always a little too loud and the floor was guaranteed to hold the soles of your shoes in a sticky embrace. A mess designed by magic.

The bathrooms were something else, with walls covered in years of drunken declarations, inside jokes and tiny, furious manifestos. Not a night passed where I wouldn’t take a second to read at least one of those musings and now, without much to read aside from reminders to maintain the pristine state of our corporate bathrooms, I realise that by making my own mark somewhere in that ocean of thoughts, I was taking part in an incredible collective poetry project.

This poetry protested the neat, orderly kind that you read in books. These funny, honest, entirely silly poems were raw and urgent, written in smudged permanent marker, unreliable ballpoint pen and sometimes pure Tippex. It was a group endeavour; an anonymous, ongoing conversation where everyone gave way to rhythm in responding to each other’s haikus. One person, drinking the last of their budget, writes “Capitalism is killing us” and underneath it, perhaps someone who can barely string a sentence together adds, “But at least the drinks are cheap”. The next stranger, intoxicated with love for this moment and everyone around her, draws a heart next to that. Finally, the person drinking their heartache away crosses it out and furiously declares “Love is a scam!”.
It’s messy and contradictory and weirdly beautiful.

I keep thinking about this idea of public bathroom graffiti as a living library. How the cubicle walls became this kind of community notice board, except instead of “Bring back lost lover” ads and past due political campaign posters, you’re being called to notice the feelings of a faceless partygoer. You’re confronted with questions, confessions, and half-baked stabs at wisdom that only make sense at 2am. Thanks to anonymity, people become really honest. You get the kind of stuff people wouldn’t dare say out loud. “I miss her so much I want to PUKE!”, “I think I’m wasting my life”, “Is anyone else scared all the time?”. Here lies evidence of our innate human need for connection; a yearning so vulnerable, it's almost painful.

Beyond the bruises, there’s also joy, dad jokes, 100 ridiculous penis drawings and random bursts of optimism. I vividly remember one that simply read, “You’re doing great, sweetie!” and honestly? I needed that at a time where I felt like nothing but failure. There’s this weird intimacy to it, you know? Strangers leaving little nuggets of solidarity, sass or grief for each other, and you’ll never know if you’ve met the person who wrote it, but you feel seen and held anyway.

I’m in awe of how a space as unglamorous as a bathroom cubicle can become a canvas for collective expression. How, over time, these walls end up telling a story, not of one person, but of everyone who has passed through, and how they felt in this single moment. A thousand tiny voices layered on top of each other, arguing, agreeing and reaching out. It’s chaotic, it’s incomplete and sometimes kind of gross, but that’s the charm.

Sure, it’s vandalism, but there’s something to be said about how our silly attempts at being recognised were rarely painted over by the maintenance crew. There was something deeply powerful about our small acts of protest against lifeless walls; about our reach for connection, even just by writing “totes” under someone else’s late-night existential crisis. It’s spontaneous, flawed and fully unrehearsed.

We’re all just looking for a space to say, “I was here and I felt this”. I’m in love with how some of the most honest poetry I’ve seen was on the walls of the smelly bathroom at my old favourite Friday night institution, written in ink that has since faded and been painted over in favour of a gentrified facelift.

But for a little while, at least, it was there. We were there.
And maybe that’s enough.