Aesthetica

by Allie Rowbottom

“Everyone says you were beautiful when you were young, but I want to tell you I think you’re more beautiful now than then. Rather than your face as a young woman, I prefer your face as it is now. Ravaged.” —Marguerite Duras, The Lover “I look at myself as an art project, and I’ll create whatever I want until I want to stop.” —Erika Jayne

I came prepared. My wine bottle, my vape pen, nineteen bars of Xanax, thirteen Ambien, fifty Vicodin. And six gel caps, prefilled with magic mushrooms, a drug I’ve never tried. My dealer threw them in with my last order. “Nature’s medicine,” he said. I think he’s worried about me.

plot of quiet beach. On the edge of town, we found it, a spot we returned to every summer, Leah and I swimming,

There’s no safe way to reject a man. So I make a show of it, storm off. Henry talks in my wake, calls out a room number. But I don’t look back.

The landscape changed to desert, broken fences, broken storefronts, the words “Indian Jewelry” “frybread” and “pottery,” painted on every wall. The girls kept filming and I

thought about Leah, what she’d said about America, privilege, appropriation, words I knew but couldn’t use. I was guilty of all of it, that much I understood. As were the girls around me, witlessly consuming real need, real people’s stories, to upload later as sidebars to their own.

At the time I created @annawrey, the most popular soul belonged to a beautiful girl with a dead father and domineering mom, a girl with a heart-shaped face, a sex tape, reality show, celebrity wedding, and slim, ribless waist, giant ass. When she declared she wanted to be a lawyer, to fight for the rights of the wrongly accused, people said it was impossible. But impossible is what we loved her for, followed and paid her for. It was only when she wanted to be smart, useful, that we wondered if she could.

I'm not a Kim K fan but this is a great take on her

I suspect it won’t last. I suspect I’ll recover, return, and sometimes the wanting will, too: to be beautiful, to be seen, to be loved and never left. Desire like that isn’t a failure, or a girlhood flight of fancy. It’s a fact of every life.