Connective Cube

Lissa fears a communal living situation. A few days ago, Maxie changed the subject when Lissa asked where they would stay the night.

The last time Lissa visited Washington DC, she stayed with self-described anti-establishment political artists and activists who could afford to live in a four bedroom house. Her friend begged for her to come down for the Pro-Choice protest event Two couples occupied two of the rooms. Lissa had to share a couch with a stranger, Pam had a twin bed in her room.

Obviously, Lissa approved of abortions. Lissa didn’t have anything better to do, and she just finished a temp job as an admin to some Viacom/MTV executive while his secretary was out for a week. As long as she only spent $10. Maybe $20.

At the event on the Mall, Lissa mostly felt hot, constrained and annoyed that only food trucks with sold out hot dogs and potato chips. They walked back to the train to Adam’s Morgan, and Lissa lost the group when she ducked into a small grocer with apples, Cliff Bars and Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups. She knew the way back, and she didn’t want to make small talk right now.

That night, Lissa drank too much vodka and sodas in the corner, terrified at how fluidly everyone spoke of the days events. All she remembered was staring at the monuments, assembling North, South East and West and shouting at all the right times and squatting part way down to relieve the synthetic plastic rubbing against her back heel. She walked barefoot back to the house once they all got off the train.

The vomit came out a slushy melange of ridged, brown glop  on top of a philodendron plant. The plant owner insisted that everything was okay, and that she had similar instances back when she used to drink. Lissa took a napkin and wiped a granola glop off a leaf. Both Lissa and the owner grabbed rags – there were no paper towels – and picked up the thicker bits. The bile soaked into the plant, and the owner had a medium size mason jar to dilute the acidic mix.

That night, Lissa shared a sofa bed with a guy that smelled more like booze, and less like vomit. Lissa slept with her head at his toes. His feet didn’t stink. While he was sleeping, Lissa wished she had more water to drink. That would involve potentially waking up the person right next to her living room space Lissa just stared at his foot at 5am, just as dawn creeped into the background.

His feet – with his middle and ring toe extending past the first toe – struck Lissa enough for her to stroke his toes. She did this for five minutes, not particularly caring if he woke up to her rigid caress.

He did wake up, but without the soft and ruddy face of men who love her toes.

“You have been doing that for awhile, haven’t you” he hissed.

“I thought you were asleep,” she said.

“Well, good job with the necrophelia. Maybe you should sleep on the floor, he said with a sense of snark that Lissa had only ever come out of the mouth of dudes who claim they are indie rock musicians today.

Jerk.

The bus pulls into Philadelphia, below the curves of browned cement, or stone. The whirl on the bus as it turns right, and then left, and then around, then right, sears of a mental list:

Don’t talk endlessly about her crush on Scullye
Don’t brag about how many people she has slept with (14)
Books – what has she read lately? In case the conversation fails
Maybe no one cares why you feel like Mark Corrigan everyday.

“I’m grabbing my bag, meet you downstairs”

“Yeah, I’ll be right down.”

This is the third time Lissa takes a trip with friends, or a friend, in the past four years. She forgets to renew her prescription, again, and this time it is two weeks without it. All she can hope is the weeks of anxious nausea stay somewhere in her core, or her head, or anywhere besides her hands whipping back and forth with words and hand motions.

Last time she spread her body on the floor of an intricate bathroom floor with tile pattens that she could not replicate when she got home three hours later. Her phone was dead at the time.

Her friend convinces her the show is full of chill people, and to take the trip to Philadelphia. It will be good for her, she says. Lissa read online that the exhibit memorializes the riot grrl movement, something that she feels is before her time, much like her love of Arthur Doyle Hand Creme and the people who claim that Sonic Youth was much cooler in the 90s.

Last time she went to a riot grrl event, some girl she met through OKCupid and who had sexy glasses and was a lesbian took her to a show at Goodbye Blue Sunday. Lissa decided to date women for a year. Now she dates both, but mostly men. They are the only people who seem interested in her, and at the end of the day, she is a bottom who likes to get on top once in a while, and prefers not to get pregnant, and who doesn’t want to give blow jobs to large cocks several times a week.

That makes life complicated on OKCupid.

Everyone at the show seemed to have a clear cut identity, or at least some attachment to Bratmobile and Bikini Kill. Or Team Dresch. The OKCupid date thrashed to the songs, grabbed Lissa by the breast and kissed Lissa’s forehead on the body to body dance floor. Lissa’s sweaty back did not make her feel like making out with anyone, and she snuck out the front door to avoid the fire hazard in case one of the amps exploded onstage.

Kathleen Hanna married the guy from The Beastie Boys. Maybe there is room for me, Lissa thinks.

Like the riot grrrl covers show, all the people there seem like her art school classmates – visually polished, gregarious and able to articulate their stance on some form of cultural theory or art history that Lissa could only emulate in her bedroom, or her living room when her roommate was away for a determinate amount of time, or anywhere that doesn’t requite her to say something witty or insightful on command.

Maxie at least could appreciate long silences on the bus. Lissa doesn’t ask too many questions about where they are staying. At best, it is on a pull out sofa an Maxie’s old friend’s sofa. At worst, it will be at a collective commune where everyone looks at Lissa like she is an alien because she looks as queer as a mother baking an apple pie.

Lissa met Maxie through OKCupid, but they agreed right away that a sexual relationship would end up in dramatic loss. Maxie is a gold star lesbian, and Lissa slept with more men than women.

Birds. If I see one in the flesh, they are seagulls or pigeons firmly grounded near the bay. They wouldn’t stand a change with the quick rotations of the current propellors. The swooping birds roar constantly, hovering above, glaring below.

Once they land, they sleep until they warm up and whiz around a two square mile space.

I count seven right now.

Those on the ground, subject to the birds’ glare. The speakers blare warnings to be in by 10pm. Too bad if you are eating pizza, eager to slip away and silently protest the state of affairs.

The cuffs are too painful, the loneliness of the trek unbearable.

The wings will swoop and illuminate shadows.

The serious caws, the thick plastic barriers pushing away the air, the ashes of yesterdays rage remain. The burning eyes, the red and blue.

Time to tuck my knees to my chin.

Is this happening again.

It had officially been five years. Her pencil nubs need sharpening, and her eraser, still in cellophane. She didn’t know where to start, what to draw, how to begin a project. Didn’t she go to school to be an art production machine, to be known at the galleries where she relied on free metallic red wine and light lagers?

Her last drawing in the middle of her sketchbook was full of angst filled scribbles with a variety of colored pencils. That was the night she downed a bottle and a half of two buck chuck – well, really three buck chuck – and tried to have her tears blend into the scribbles. Tears and lead don’t intermingle well, nor with plastic filled color pencils.

She overheard someone at a coffee shop talking to another friend about another friend, questioning the said friend’s decision to pursue a career in design post-college. This someone, with a mullet haircut and clean white jersey shirt with a print of a woman with loopy hair and large, sad eyes, said that the person would be designing already if they wanted to design. Apparently this friend, this person Lissa couldn’t point out on the street, or even by memory, was a total train wreck. No wonder design appealed to them.

On the way home from the coffee shop, she had this internal argument with this someone about desiring an artistic praxis rather than doing it. Was this someone one of the lucky vocal ones who had a built in community to practice with, people who she grew up with who admired what she had to say? Who was she to judge someone’s desire?

Lissa had desired to draw again starting three months ago. This would require her to retrieve her drawing materials from the bottom of a box, one of the five she hadn’t bothered to open since she moved around this time last year. The large box also had tapes and CDs, ones she gave her, ones that Lissa couldn’t bring to throw away.

This woman, the one who apparently didn’t have a hard time engaging with her own desires, forced Lissa to open that box. It was a medium box, slightly larger than the other small boxes that contained her books. Her new place doesn’t have a bookshelf, or any place to store anything beyond a small bed, desk and wardrobe for her ever tightening clothing collection.

The clothes got so tight that Lissa ordered a pair of her favorite pants two sizes up on some site she had never been to. They would come tomorrow, or the next day. Lissa’s thigh barely fit into her current pair.

Once she got home, she took off her elastic waist skirt and put on her green polka dot pajama pants and dragged the box off the top shelf of the closet in the hallway. Her roommate, who wasn’t home, would have no idea that she took the Wusthof knife – again – to open take on the box. Last time, Lissa was caught in action, and then claimed the knife looked a lot like her own dull, barely sharp knife she purchased from Walmart, or Target.

The knife pierces the loose layers of tape, and Lissa works her fresh violet fingernail in-between the two wedges and works open the box. On top, it is mostly mix tapes, her mixes  that she switched back and forth with Cass over five years. She takes them out and puts them in neat piles of five next to her mattress on the floor. 10 rows.

Too bad she doesn’t have a tape player right now that works, even though she would like to put all 50 tapes in the player and have the ribbons twist and crunch into unrecoverable knots.

The CD books were easier to deal with. CDs she hasn’t touched to three years since she uploaded them all onto her computer. She kicks herself for not keeping the artwork and the cases.

The notebooks and pencil cases, the watercolor paints and brushes, are all in plastic bins at the bottom. She pulls out the pencils, the notebooks and flips through her intricate illustrations of flower vases, food still lives, swirly hair, charcoal faces and red, many red ink drawings of chairs. Some drawings just remind her of her As and Bs in school, those late nights she would draw buildings outside her window.

She puts her bins of supplies next to her tapes, flipping through more books. Lissa never showed her work at galleries in school, except for her senior exhibition. No prizes, and all people could talk about was the pretty girl’s reworking of a modern, restaurant farm-to-table inspired tampon box. Whenever her exhibit came up, people looked away, looked down, looked her anywhere but in the eye.

Her exhibit, an exploration in women walking on the streets, didn’t turn out she intended. Lissa tried to pull together a video of women she shot in dresses, walking with gentle struts, walking with purpose. Except she conceived this at the last minute under the guidance of her advisor, who also advised pretty girl. Her advisor said that her painting and drawing could benefit from more perspective on her, well, ‘unique’ style. This required learning video editing in a week, and, well, one of her final comments said that her editing ‘makes no sense’.

Lissa doesn’t care to make sense. Lissa takes an F pencil and starts to draw small circles with the hardened lead. Maybe she could draw a thousand circles this evening.