Show Me
They’re usually in groups and giggle for no reason at all. They’re like those girls in movies– effortless and in full possession of themselves. They’re impenetrable but I manage somehow. I mirror their mannerisms, their snap shallow exchanges and remarks. I want to see if I can do it successfully and pass. I do it like I’m playing a game, for no reason other than to see if I can play it well. It’s a game I intend to win and master. But if I lose, it’s just a game and real life exists somewhere else. I’d then be impelled to go look for it and I’m too lazy for that.
Things having to do with movement, grace and existing in physical spaces amid people with a lightness and ease, had never come naturally to me but I’m in their sphere now. The atmosphere in our group of four, eddies around me and then back to them in swift, easy currents like cigarette smoke. I pride myself on my skill, at how I’ve become a chameleon. I didn’t possess this magic power before but now I suddenly find it in my lap. I revel in it. I intend to wean it for what it’s worth. At the tail end of my teens, I learn how to pose in photos like a normal teen girl such that it accentuates all the right angles of me, parts I didn’t even know I had. I learn how to laugh at silly TikToks and train myself to see what they see in them. I put on makeup and make sex jokes with the girls at which they guffaw and laud me because the joke is so fresh and unexpected. They say YES. This is the Anisa I wanna see. So I show them. I make their occupations and thoughts mine; adopt them, adorn myself in them because I’ve been given a pass. I’ve passed. As what you ask? One of them.
Before the party, they’re talking about a reality TV show and I slide myself in.
“Isn’t that the one with youngsters playing on the beach?” I say, a bit offhandedly. I slept at four yesterday and I’m still groggy.
She laughs and I’m confused.
“We’re youngsters, what are you talking about. The way you said it” she keeps laughing.
“Oh right. Yeah we are hahah” I say. I forgot.
***
I look at the label on the Tropicana juice can. 100% fresh fruit, made with guava, strawberry, and cranberries. All natural ingredients. Cool water droplets cling to its aluminum surface like sweat beading my neck. I’m taken in by fabricated labelings – I let myself be. Embellishments that promise a lot but deliver little. But for the first time, they don’t go unnoticed by me. They have my attention, and not just to ensure that I’m not putting expired stuff into my mouth. Along with the juice, I gulp down all fancily typefaced words on it and the tropical beach illustrations. The juice is tasty because the potent words and labeling are swirling inside it along with its actual contents. But I am sold.
Sipping it, I believe my body is being rejuvenated this summer afternoon just like the ads promised. Suddenly, I’m a girl in a summer advert, sitting on the beach under the shade of a palm tree as the sun scorches hot and bright. An artist’s model, posing at once both unbothered and fully attuned to the camera’s gaze. I laugh looking at the now empty tinny can, giddy at how easily I slipped into this persona, this mirage. And once more, even after all this time, the incredulity at how I was even allowed to. How the spell stays unbroken despite the realization.
I play out a fantasy; fill in the colors inside the outlines because I can now. I don’t do it to hold up the picture to someone and say, look, but to show myself the picture and believe that I can inhabit it and look like someone in her natural habitat. I want to break the conceptions I have of myself and expand its boundaries.
***
I’m climbing a hill, thousands of miles away from the tiring upkeep of youthfulness. Despite the tiring climb, I’m relaxed, with my cousins behind and ahead of me.
We stop to take a selfie at the top of the hill. My lower body is out of the photo but my torso is leaning into the frame as I smile a full-lipped smile. My lips pucker ever so slightly. My face is leaning forward too; my whole being always bending toward something, assuming a shape that isn’t mine. After the photo, my cousin laughs and says, Look at her pose and pout.
What are you even trying to do?
I wasn’t posing, I say. And I wasn’t. I’d assumed the pose out of habit. It had become second nature. But they see through and I’m caught in the act. I don’t pass. But this time I’m glad I don’t.
“So, anything new with you Anisa, now that the first year is done?” he asks when we’re in the car. And I know what he’s insinuating, teasing.
“I don’t like guys” I say.
He waits, expectant.
“Or people” I finish off, with my characteristic cynical flair. We both grin as he pulls over the car in front of the restaurant where we’re supposed to meet his friends for dinner. I feel the freely growing, wild vines inside me after a long time and I don’t clip or prune them, unruly and unyielding as they are. As I walk into the restaurant and greet his friends, I feel their tangle and let it show. Let it show.
Anisa is a writer living in Wisconsin. Her essays and stories have previously been published in Vagabond City Lit and recognized by the UK Poetry Society and Cambridge University. Twitter: @janodeigh. She writes a blog on Substack.
