Aesthetica

by Allie Rowbottom

I knew it didn’t matter if Itty Bitty left her man or stayed. His words were fastened inside her now, implanted.

“You’re a man,” I say, “you can’t understand. You all say you want natural, but what does that mean? It means the illusion of natural.”

I wondered if what I missed was less Leah herself, than the time we shared before sharing time the way we did was either eroticized or pathologized; before it was consumed by men.

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.

It’ll be a relief, my mother said once, the end of all that being looked at. She said she wanted it to be just her, no men to show off for and though at the time I didn’t believe she meant it, now I suppose I do. Maybe it was the way Henry looked at me, stripped, the way I’d asked him to look, but today there’s a sort of contentment to invisibility, even if 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.

I cry for us both, what she endured, what I have to live without. The sad fact that I’ll never again be seen by her.

Every mirror is an illusion. The only one I want is the one my mother offered, a vision of myself through her eyes.

It’s up to me to look upon myself the way I imagine she would: with love. Maybe that’s the wisest approach to the life left for me to move through, age into. It’s a privilege, to age, I see that now.