Under The Overpass: A Shared language in Graffiti

We didn’t know each other when we slipped past that chain link fence. Not really. A month is nothing in the grand scheme of things and when you’re going through the growing pains of living in another country, it means even less. But we all signed our names under that highway on the edge of Paris, and I like to think that means something. I never thought I would get a chance like this, to spend time in a place so different from my own home, to spend time with other students getting course credit for exploring the haunts of Paris, both well-known and obscure. Four years of college are just about finished, and I’ve seen more of the world than the past two generations of my family. I’ll graduate in a few days now. I won’t see any of these people again. And yet for a moment, a month, an evening, a single second of passing a spray paint can from one hand to another, there was an understanding. It didn’t matter who we were, when we were surrounded by decades of art left under a street overpass with  others who yearned for that same connection to see it....