Aesthetica

by Allie Rowbottom

She went to rehab when I was two, and again the year after. Second time, she did the work, discharged with resolve.

She joined Facebook groups for concerned parents, bookmarked articles about body image, campus sexual assault, our changing attention spans, brain tumors from cellular waves. Some of it turned out to be fake news, some of it didn’t. None of it mattered to me. I had already decided to be different. If a powerful man chose me, it would give me power, too.

With Jake I was close to power, but not fully in possession of it, neither a child nor a woman, and not yet a wolf.

Before I started the pill, my periods had been irregular anyway. My mom took me to a stern gynecologist who said birth control was the only way to protect me from myself, the disordered eating habits she accused me of “courting.” “You could kill yourself,” the doctor said, and I felt my brain go static. The rest reached me like a far-off channel, voices through the snow. Early osteoporosis, infertility, heart problems.

I was different from her, I was healthy. We both wanted to believe that. But I couldn’t seem to separate love from sameness. I was different, so I had to leave.

Parallels between her mom's addiction to substances and hers to instagram and fame. Is she truly "healthy" as she thinks?

I typed Leah’s handle in the search bar. She had 365 followers and a feed full of landscapes, animals and food.

It seemed intentional, the absence of her body, and had since the day she left. Freshman year of high school, her parents relocated from Houston to Australia, another oil hub. A sudden promotion, an unexpected move. Every day since then, I’d looked for her on Instagram. As if any image I found could return me to the real girl, anyway.

It was sometimes difficult to tell where she ended and I began. My mother was the one to remind us. To parse the differences in our personalities: Leah’s, obsessive and extreme, focused on animals, sports, the great beyond. And mine: scared sometimes, sometimes needy, but happy with the safety of my world, the best friend I shared it with, the mother who pointed out our diverging bodies like she was trying to warn us we would someday grow apart. Which, of course, we did.

I forked paintbrushes between the fingers of my left hand, picked up my phone again with my right and snapped a selfie of my artist self. In Facetune, I softened my skin to a poreless sheen; I snatched my waistline, my jawline. I applied a grainy filter, to simulate the skin texture I’d erased, then arranged the edited image in the square of a new post. “The Artist’s Way,” I wrote for a caption.

She had started her own account. Her handle was @Naurene48. Her profile was blank, just an anonymous, disembodied head, belonging to a man. Only sometimes did she show up on my feed, not often enough for me to worry about her presence there. “I’m out doing other things,” I imagined her saying. “Real things,” real life. Sorting library books and issuing cards. Sipping cold decaf coffee from the special Starbucks mug I’d given her for Christmas. Cleaning the car. Depositing paychecks at the bank in person, still distrusting of the mobile app; “real things.”