Like Me

by Hayley Phelan

I thought of my body as a tool, something I owned. I could rent it out if I wanted to—which is more or less what I did. For all that talk about selling one’s soul, no one seems to be in the market. It’s the body that everybody wants. The body is a currency everyone can understand.

Though I did not think it at that very moment, I was angry. It was an anger that was loose and unspecific, a faint tint that had spread like dye in water.

There was only one way I knew how to seek revenge. Make the men want me.

It was the kind of thing brands had started posting recently, as if they were moral entities instead of capitalist enterprises, as if they had values beyond customer retention and profit margin. We’d come to expect this from them—they were now our legislators, our educators, and, most importantly, our friends. As people began to think of themselves more and more as brands, brands started to feel more and more like people.

One comment read, in all-cap letters: I WANT TO BE HER. I screenshotted it immediately, my brain humming with pleasure. I thought: Me too. I want to be her, too.

I think of those young women who write to me, wearing my face on their chests, who don’t know anything about me really, but seem eager to take my place. I think about that vacant look in their eyes and I remember the young woman I used to be. We are all of us trapped inside a hall of mirrors, our shiny, hard exteriors reflecting both to each other and on each other, ad infinitum, forever and ever so we can’t escape.