A Story in a Park Bench

My steps today took me along the bay in central Helsinki as I remembered there was something carved in one of the benches along the shore which I'd seen a while ago and wanted to photograph properly. I decided to do a series of the benches. 

This one's just a cell phone picture but a good one as such and one I really like: the positive, optimistic message/exhortation, the weather-beaten and grey but warm-feeling surface of the bench, the scratching on it, and as a sort of a contrast to the message and the wood the desolate feeling of the cigarette butts. There's a story in the picture, whatever it might be. I hope it's a happy one: a group of young people sitting here in the evening, smoking and enjoying each other's company, and one of them happily writing the exhortation; or perhaps a happy couple watching the sunset. But it might be a sad story too: someone sitting alone, disappointed in love, after a relationship with a too possessive and jealous partner, expressing his or her feelings in that message on the wood surface (as in wanting to say how it should be instead of how it was). Or it might have been a campaigner for optimism, going around the city leaving his or her messages for anyone who happened on the spot to find.

It's such an ordinary, everyday image, but at the same time so moving.