Connective Cube

The imperative to source Tesla’s and Ferrari’s makes me want to go to the marble palace and listen to the echoes of my own wretching.

The CEO is now gone, and has been for two weeks. His words, ‘we are in the business of hiring Tesla’s, and Ferrari’s, and Porsche’s. We also need some solid and reliable Honda’s’ churn through my brain pathways every time I review another portfolio, another resume, another copywriter or designer who needs some way to pay bills for their artistic training.

Today, I breeze past the front-desk attendant while she settled someone in the clinical red room, the color of clean blood. My schedule would allow for some blotches on my face, at least for two hours. Some people can cry, and look like they briefly have glassy, yet dewy eyes.

I am not so lucky. I have learned to hold my tears, to breathe deeply, and to create a casing of resting bitch face in spaces of high stakes commerce. In the bathroom, I can crumble, for a few, knowing that no one looks for me. For now, I can tuck my knees into my protruding belly, put my head between my knees, and feel the hot tears saturate my leggings and release audible sobs.

This creates less blotches on my face. The blotches, more of a mosaic of various saturations of all the warm colors, could yield hundreds of hex codes with the eyedropper tool in Photoshop.

The crumbling stops when someone starts punching in the key code. There is enough time to stand from my squat and sit on the toilet seat, usually with my underwear up.

For all she knows, I am taking a long shit.

I wait. Pull some toilet paper from the dispenser, taking my time. In the women’s bathroom, many people hold their poop, I think, when others are in the bathroom. In all my crying jags, people are in, then out of the stall.

The waiting for the mirror check takes the longest. In such a building, the bathrooms have separate mirror areas, ideal for losing five minutes to perfect lip gloss, or pin hair 10 different ways.

When the door clicks shut, I make my escape, washing my hands. I take a paper towel, wet it, and absorb the smell of pulp as I cool my face. The blotch level is a six, the same as a contained yet noticeable splash with a cannonball at the deep end of a swimming pool.

Luckily, I can skate back to my desk, quietly. I am on the outer edge, and I only have to walk past the front-desk attendant, who barely says hello to me. She looks up to my boss, who brags about drinking three $30 glasses of wine and worships the the Kardashians, the Hiltons. They want their own reality show together, and I can’t understand how someone who reads Margaret Atwood worships the equivalent of Ayn Rand, or Anne Coulter.

Or maybe I have always been too wary of tall, thin blonde people with disposable income and who express unironic eagerness to dress as Regina George from Mean Girls for Halloween.

None of them can see me cry.