Aesthetica

by Allie Rowbottom

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 the longer I looked, the more I wondered if image alteration might actually be empowering. For women, so often robbed of agency, was there some freedom in controlling how the world saw our bodies, consumed our bodies? My final project for that Photoshop course was my own image, edited every which way. A smile where there’d been a frown. Smooth skin where there’d been acne scars. Absence where there’d been fat and flesh. Fat and flesh where there’d been absence. Yeah, it was empowering to decide which version I preferred.

Sometimes when it goes to work, when it mixes with AMPs or benzos or whatever else, I see things, hear things, that aren’t really there. A common side effect, like chemical drip or dry mouth. And worth it, to arrive in that permissive, powerful place I have always wanted to inhabit. 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.

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.

What was it about me that failed to feel what I was supposed to? I didn’t want to feel it; I wanted to be forced to feel it, as if feeling would prove the love I’d had, squandered, lost for good.

send a sign, make me wise and womanly the way I told myself she had been. She had been the right kind of woman: chaste and maternal, natural and correct about the source of her own illness, a martyr when nobody believed her soon enough to save her life. But that’s not who she was, not totally. And that’s never who I’ll be. Still, I miss her. I don’t know her. Not the way some women grow up and learn to know their moms. Sometimes, around my period mostly, 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.

waiting, on some unconscious plane, for her to come back and see me. But she isn’t coming back. 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.

“HOW DO YOU see the world?” my rehab therapist asked the day I arrived and again the day I left. A pattern of tragedy, respite, tragedy, I said both times. But this wasn’t always the case. “Be the wolf,” Leah recited, and once I thought I could. Once I thought I could use power, the people who had it, the men, to make me immune to loss. I had the privileges attached to health and youth and whiteness. And a wide open something I mistook for beauty. I imagine it now as an invisible mark, an absence where a father went, a fear of who I’d be without a mother. She had always been sick, and even when I pushed her away, even as I tried to be different, I knew to fear her loss. I am responsible; I am not at fault. I want to feel that both are true. Here, in this replica, this room that is both present and past, I bargain with my brain, consider the worth of a story like mine. I am neither lost nor found, lucky nor cursed, and no fairy Godmother is coming to save me.