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

lobster

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.

Womanly things, like love is overrated and pleasure is a right.

Drugs erase time, age, mistakes; drugs don’t work the way they used to. But they’re better than nothing, the closest thing I’ve got now to what Instagram once promised.

She loads slow and outdated, a museum of my past selves, every image the remains of a girl, frozen in time, waiting for me to return and rescue her.

Other people rarely understood how she could be so many things, all at once. It was like they wanted her reduced, simplified.

Downstairs at the Princess Hotel, the lobby is dead, no music even. I flip-flop to the bar, still wearing the robe from my room, nothing underneath. The outfit seemed acceptable before and now feels borderline unhinged,

Then she bent to take off her jeans, and I noticed the winnow of her legs, her shrunken ass, and felt a deep, familiar fear. Of my helplessness, and hers. I thought of so many stories I’d grown up hearing, messages from the world, cautionary tales about unaccompanied women, women without men. Women walking and running along isolated paths; road tripping women, pulled over for a pee at the wrong truck stop. Women with lives, women who forgot there were conditions to how they should be lived. Stories like that always ended in death.

she didn’t intend abandonment, I knew that. But once she was gone, I changed the story anyway, made it familiar: I was needy, wrong, unwanted by her and anytime she texted or called, I didn’t answer; to do so would be to confuse the lesson of my unlovability.

I wanted drastic transformation, wanted to watch myself come back slowly in the bathroom mirror, reborn from blood and bruises, all that violence.

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.