What Curtis Kulig Wrote on the Wall

Curtis Kulig spent years writing "Love Me" on walls—warehouses, alley corners, construction hoarding in cities he passed through. The phrase started as a tag and became something else: a kind of desperate shorthand that worked because it refused to specify who was asking or who was supposed to respond. Love Me. It functions as command, plea, and caption for everything simultaneously.

Valentine’s Day makes me mildly tired, not because I’m against sentiment but because the sentiment gets so thoroughly industrialized. The holiday arrives with its infrastructure pre-assembled—heart-shaped containers, wine with a red ribbon, the reservation at the place you’d never normally go—and you’re supposed to feel something genuine inside all that scaffolding. Sometimes you do. Usually it’s a little like watching someone else’s dream.

What Kulig’s work understood is that the desire underneath the holiday is real even when the expression of it is hollow. People actually want to be loved, specifically and permanently, not seasonally. "Love Me" on a concrete wall in January says more than most greeting cards manage in February.