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.
