I used a public restroom, today, and I snapped a picture of the stall door. Someone has written the words Suicide Club on the stainless steel in electric youth pink. I don’t know if it’s a plea for help, or a bid for attention, or just graffiti referencing a movie or manga. And I don’t know who wrote it. The response–also anonymous–reads, “Please get help. This, too will pass.”

Do you care? 

Yes, I care.

Women use bathroom stall doors as bulletin boards to communicate the things they wouldn’t or couldn’t say in real life to a person with a face. They talk to each other. Two way communication. Private. Anonymous. Deniable. No, I didn’t ask about that. I was just taking a dump.

The first real message I remember reading scrawled across a stall door was in high school. I must have been fourteen or so, and fairly sheltered. I was still getting used to **profanity** and sex was just something kids who smoked and drank did. That first message–in its entirety–read, “Someone in this school eats pussy, and it’s not a guy.”

Word for word. Cunnilingus, Lesbianism, and… someone actually wrote the phrase “eats pussy” in a public place.

At the time, I thought of it as graffiti written for the shock value.  Maybe… maybe I believed what it said was possible. And maybe I did look around and wonder for a second or two which girl it was.

But that message wasn’t meant for me. I read it as a piece of mindless gossip. Someone else might have recognized it as a confession, or an ecstatic shout of connection. And someone might have shouted back, or given a quiet sigh of relief.

I saw the same message (different words) in college, and by then, I did recognize it. The very last stall in the university’s “historical” women’s restroom was the “Lesbian Stall” (Labeled on the inside, black sharpie) and maintenance sanded the stall door down twice a year to remove the accumulated conversations.

I had something to write, then, and I didn’t write it, but the idea that I could have, and that someone would have answered… it mattered.

I’m afraid my bisexual boyfriend is only with me because he wants children, and because he doesn’t have to come out to his father, if he marries a woman.

I hit the ground hard with that one. I’m shaking, a little, and if I think about it long enough, there’s no doubt I’ll cry. Question for the stall door.

And there have been a lot of stall door questions from a lot of women, since then. A lot of topics, and a lot of secrets.

The stall door a safe place. A strangely self-moderating place. The “community” routinely scratches out unacceptable responses. And there’s almost always an answer.Whole threads of conversation, back and forth. Or solitary encouragement. Yes, I care.