Aesthetica

by Allie Rowbottom

a purer version of myself; I want to become them all.

I was special, destined to transcend the small lives of the women who came before me;

For women, so often robbed of agency, was there some freedom in controlling how the world saw our bodies, consumed our bodies?

Stories were rawer than posts, more true. Stories showed life as it truly was, not like the grid where everything was painted over, robbed of any contrast, any ugly underbelly.

“We should join,” I said, taking in the bodies, comparing them to my own, which was

Thinking in emojis

Counting is an instinct I can’t silence. Counting is like hunger itself. I used to think it would protect me. As if in reducing the essence of something—a story, a meal, a body—to a number, I’d know its truest value.

Mirroring the number of likes

I step back. “Don’t start with this,” I say aloud, though it’s too late. Before my eyes, my face becomes a landslide, running downhill. There’s filler under the skin, collected in the troughs. And still it falls. Doesn’t it? I can’t trust what I see, can never know what about me is real. Which laser facial designed to smooth fine lines and sun damage burned white ridges into my chin? I see them if I squint, don’t I? Which dermal filler, and how much of it, migrated from my marionette lines and changed the mobility of my mouth? It slopes sadly now, incapable of smiling. And who botched my first nose job, who botched my second? Which strip-mall med spa, which injector, aesthetician, plastic surgeon—and there have been many—left a lip lift scar in the middle of my face?

Ravaging the body

“Not anti-aging, graceful aging,” I say, and load women’s shopping baskets with promises of transformation, erasure, control. Empty promises, I’ve always thought, illusory. The women shouldn’t trust me. Even as a child, I believed the solution to age and plainness was to transform the body itself, not cover it; to shrink or expand as needed through starvation, exercise,

I just want to look like myself, my true self, stripped of time and the violence of past mistakes.

—I sifted through my DMs, turning lately, as my following grew, toward violence. You disgust me. Cunt. Ima turn that ass inside out. Choke on this cock. Make you

next. It was apparently commonplace to undergo multiple cosmetic procedures on the way to wholeness, selfhood.

Were these women addicts? Or were they simply empowered, in touch with their desire, financially and spiritually ready to pursue the body of their dreams, the shape in which they’d finally feel at home? Home might take a lifetime to achieve, but these were women #blessed to have money or good credit, a healthy baseline to begin with, a whole lifetime to give over to achievement.

When I woke again, we were parked. Jake was on my phone. “She can’t right now,” he said. On the other end, a voice was yelling. I heard the word daughter, then the sound of my own name.

turned, tumbled me, a plastic figurine like the princess toys I played with in the bathtub as a girl: Ariel and Aurora, Jasmine and Belle. My mother kept them in a basket under the sink. They were immobile, their arms and legs bent in stiff postures, their feet covered by skirts and molded to thick pedestals. But I had loved them, had gifted them stories beyond true love’s kiss and happily ever after, stories of adventure, journeys of their own. And when danger befell them, when bad men threatened harm, I had given my princesses the power to fight.

at the Princess Hotel, the lobby is dead, no music even.

Wonderment, maybe—technological advancement, science, men and their inventions—maybe horror.

But why was I responsible? Why did my mother see me as someone to confide in, depend on? Why did she talk endlessly of everything that hurt her? Her quest for self-knowledge, self-love, feminism, womanhood, wholeness, was so public and I, of all people, should have understood her exhibitionism. But I wanted a mother out of pain, which took her from me.

I wanted the nurse to talk to me gently, as she would a child. It’s a feeling I still have sometimes, around women.

How can I trust my memory? My story, altered by time and drugs and every passage I’ve made into anesthesia, and out again. Even if I spoke to Vanity Fair, came forward about Jake, I’ve little reason to think the world would believe a woman like me, so obviously dysmorphic, out of touch with what’s real. And if they did, there’s always a consequence.

For now, better to strike a reassuring tone, a tone to suggest that I was in control, fully competent, not avoidant or afraid.

She didn’t have the luxury of adolescence, a childhood before pain. Maybe her pain meant my childhood was also tainted, though anytime I had the thought it felt like an excuse. Plenty of kids grow up without a dad. Plenty of kids have a sick parent they have to take care of.

“You want people to wonder,” Jake said when we planned the reveal. “But never really know.”

infection. “Expect to be shocked,” he said, which was what I wanted. I wanted drastic transformation, wanted to watch myself come back slowly in the bathroom mirror, reborn from blood and bruises, all that violence.

“Gorgeous,” he said and stared for a moment longer, awkward like a child, totally confident I wouldn’t care, which I didn’t. I liked the attention, felt validated in the surgeon’s line of sight, an object to be fixed. He saw what I saw, the asymmetry, the age, everything I’ve done to try and hide it. And this made me love him.

I was @annawrey, neither myself, nor someone else, a fantasy worth 60,000 followers. As a Blazed Bud I could be loved beyond 100,000; as a Blazed Bud, I could be worth as much as Erin the weightlifter, Ella, my father, that forgotten time before Leah, where memory began. And after that, I’d never be alone again.

It’s like seeing a mean email, a troll’s nasty DM, Jake. It’s like seeing every mistake I’ve ever made, blown up and blistered on my own skin, almost beautiful in its honesty. I was supposed to be prepared for this. Following surgery, it’s important you don’t make any major decisions, operate any heavy machinery or rush to self-judgement during the first seventy-two hours, said the paperwork I signed at the Aesthetica Center.

Taped into our Blaze uniforms, we were almost identical, different only slightly in tan tone, hair color, height. We were a type, and took selfies to show the world the similarity of our bodies, smushed together to fit the same size screen, broken apart while we scrolled, assessing the images we made,