Paint builds up over the years. Coated over itself like mollusk's nacre. Sideways as the titan of an old wall comes down, like counting the rings of a tree. Much like a tree marks the years gone by, as does the paint. The sheen, composition, the color, finish, spins a story in of itself. The beauty of office paints through the years, and for their owners that believed in color theory, the feeling they wanted to inspire in their employees. The average greys and pale yellows are sometimes inspired by a bold deep blue or orange or red in its lifetime. Going far back enough sometimes reveals lead if you're in the right place for it. No amount of pigment covers the sin of the lead's touch to the wall.
As much that could be told from the palette can be told by the painter. An unseemly cut-job that flecks up on the once-white metal frame of the ceiling, or a speckle on the tile; paint that leaps up and away from the unweildy brush and roller weilder who paints the face of what would've been their wall. A run in the wall from a roller who tread the wall, paint bursting from its seams as it trailed, and left untidy in its wake, forever encrusting itself to the drywall. A streaky white coat that reveals a bright red under it's skin from a painter who didn't care to coat the wall more than once, letting the bare wall blush in the din of the almost-white office.
The wall remembers when it was new drywall on brick, it's limbs ache at the seams where it separates out into separate rooms where the memory ebbs and flows. Where there used to be the kitchen became shortened into an office on the side. Pipes spring up and in and root into a new, second bathroom. The floor remembers where there used to be offices, held under the newly installed carpet. It remembers, in the crevaces where silverfish dare to tread, in the drywall dust, the remnants of a blue-grey carpet that got cut and pushed in and under before they installed the brown. The beetles long-dried in the gap between inside and outside of the windows whisper amongst themselves. A photo appended to a card that got pushed behind a cabinet and left there. It all remembers the pale robin's egg that becomes cookie dough that becomes off-white that becomes ochre that becomes morning mist. The building holds it close and remembers.

Go back home?