Aesthetica

by Allie Rowbottom

I feel their oneness inside me, like hunger.

I folded one arm over my chest and scrolled my phone, considering how to appear casual, chill, considering what TV show, movie, Instagram feed I could draw from to appear casual, chill. Anything but awkward or worse, anxious;

It was sometimes difficult to tell where she ended and I began.

Why does his opinion matter? All at once, it feels like a permission I must have, in order to get what I want.

“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.”

The day we said goodbye, I had cried and Leah had not. Just kissed my cheek and left my body like a bell, struck and ringing.

I was needy, wrong, unwanted by her

grateful the conversation was over and I could stop trying to respond the right way.

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

But I was listening when I should have been talking, acting, fighting. I’ve been this way since girlhood.

women I looked nothing like, had no possibility of resembling.

Again, morality is what we’re supposed to have arrived at, an obvious, absolute morality we can all agree is right and good, pure and natural. The collective over the individual, the collective over the #cancelleds, the Karens, the ableds, the incels, the long-haul Purells. The collective agreement that only certain stories deserve telling, while others should stay untold, punished for the privilege they once had.

the fact of the soul which wants to tell itself.

What was it about me that failed to feel what I was supposed to?