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Later, while brushing my teeth, I spotted curlicued black hairs crowding the blades of her razor like weeds pushing through the shutters of a boarded-up house and felt angry in a way that made me want to be even meaner. I was harsh but she was clueless.
Contouring and gua sha massage, retinol and ten-step serum routines, all abandoned, as if she thought learning to care for herself would rob her own mom of the chance to rise from the dead and teach her.
But in a way, he’d given me a gift, freedom, by abandoning me. Because here I was, hustling harder for what I’d lost.
Leverage was how empires were built, the walls of a well-made house high and thick and every bill paid on time, everyone inside healthy and safe.
For women, so often robbed of agency, was there some freedom in controlling how the world saw our bodies, consumed our bodies?
It felt for a moment like relief, to have to go back, to have no other choice.
I read that a frozen face has been proven to a make a woman happier than an expressive one; she looks in the mirror, sees less trouble, and becomes it.
Guilt, my mother always told me, was boring and therefore bad.
My mother’s ancient Prius was festooned with bumper stickers: generations of failed democratic candidates. Nasty Woman, read the latest.
My mother assumed all women were on her side, and she was shocked when this turned out to be untrue, as it often did.
So much science can solve about women’s bodies—boobs, butts, labia, anything that sags. But how to fix a thin dick, a receding hairline, remains a mystery.
He’s back with my plate before I’ve stirred, the service so fast the food can’t be good.
People are so shitty, I thought, and imagined posting a video of the airless room, just me inside, a performance of the empty rooms inside us all.
I moved to my own account, ordained by Blaze, and growing. 80,000 followers, 85,000, 90,000. From a narrow, windowless room, I watched them build, bought by the surgical perfection of my body, the failure of my mother’s, as if any love I earned was both a trade and a punishment.
I pass under an archway, enter a pretend village where pretend peasants barter and where, I suppose, heroes and heroines are supposed to have grown up, never guessing they were special until adventure presented itself and they denied, then finally accepted, the call. Or maybe they always knew they were special, but hid themselves among the plebes anyway, aware of bad prophecies, jealous stepmothers, violent husbands, the danger in being seen.
Once, I wandered down an internet rabbit hole, found a website for a product called True Mirror™, which claims to show you to yourself as others see you. Conventional mirrors flip the reflection and therefore aren’t true, the website said. But the True Mirror™, built of several mirrors, shows you how you look in other people’s eyes. Mirror, mirror on the wall, who is the fairest of us all? read a banner at the top of TrueMirror.com. Have YOU been looking in the mirror your whole life and deluding yourself? the rest of the sales pitch went. Now, for only five hundred dollars, you can own the
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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.
I looked older than my age, but eerily wrinkle free, neither a girl nor a woman, and even if I wanted to express a feeling about it, I couldn’t. I knew it was a problem, but still visited the med spa every three months like I was going to church. And every time I made the drive, I felt excited, like this treatment would be the treatment that changed everything.
I don’t know if I ever can, don’t know how much regret it’d take to return to what we had as girls. As it is, we’ve made a distant love out of a bond that seemed once like life itself.
