image retention

by Romy Rhoads Ewing

i. 

In the small and desperate hours of the night, I would contort myself into a mess of emaciated limbs, twisting around a laptop. Fall Out Boy or Panic!? When a boy speaks to you–never mind how–what is the objectively correct, attractive, dignified thing to say in return? Which of these people who aren’t you are you? This was not my first rodeo–I knew exactly what each answer would lead to. To choose either diverged paths of coy or certain in too heavy-handed a way was to have acknowledged the thing hanging over me, over all of us–acknowledged desire. At that age, laying it on so thick felt like a felony, disgusting and brutish: self==aware!=self-respecting, unretractably so. A threshold crossed. You can choose to be self-isolating, perhaps so wise and misunderstood that you are lost in a chasm forged by your own agonizing wisdom beyond your years–although this can be bastardized and manipulated by the personality-quiz-creating arbiters of identity as spacy, unaware, lost in a dream rather than in thought, a slippery backslide into ditzy. And, of course there are only Punnett squares and ranked choice voting and no room for nuance, because nuance is boring and cannot punch you through your screen and burn an LED silhouette of you into the ether. Each permutation of each microcosmic slice of a girl, or a low-res picture of one, at least. A result. A million of them, cumulatively. A bang over one eye. A unknowing grin baring #FFFFFF teeth. Searching for some rippling piece of silver in the detritus in which to see myself. It never turned up. That world-fearing, load-bearing girl lives in me still. Asking to be shown something new, to be torn wide open, to be sent someone to sew her back shut and to get the promise in writing. 

ii. 

I would study anime tropes like the gospel of beliefs I was yet to form, that I knew were soon to come, the way these tiny acts would become me. I’d tire of live-action, of Western actors with pores and mortgages who knew how to move through the world unarduously. I wanted to look at girls who were so bad at walking and talking they exploded. I wanted eyebrows sprouting from pink bangs sprouting from the scalp. For someone to confess their love for me on a school rooftop. Shoujo, both glittering and brooding, would not only clog the family router in an unhemorrhageable bottleneck, but would also max out my library card every single week. You really like this, don’t you? I was asked checking out once. Lotta people your age seem to. I frowned. I was known, but not in the ways I’d prayed for, the ways in which I’d wanted to be wanted with the same intensity I could only see in myself or in something so literally cartoonish. I didn’t want to be a voyeur in a crowd of onlookers–not when the crowd is being watched, too.

iii. 

At 27, I poke at the stew my family spent all day making, cold and shaky in the familiar way that eschews hunger. The house is packed, the couch swallowing me as I wait for something to latch onto conversationally, my mind combing through the static. Everyone is talking about Mike Tyson, and nobody is doing the voice, which astounds me. I eventually conclude that it’s because I have a mild, intermittent lisp. This, I conclude next, is proof of my being, of identity, of existing in the minds of loved ones as they do in mine. Reverse sonder. I don't mind scraps. And I don’t mind when something in me boils until it destroys me, then simmers. By the time I drink it in, it’s nearly gone cold. 

iv. 

It should come as no shock when I concede that my love of writing came from being written to. My parents would leave really thoughtful notes around when I was growing up. I kept journals with the foresight that I’d look back on them someday. My first boyfriend would leave these very involved handwritten notes in my desk. The things I write become precious by merit of their margins. These lists of what I was, explanations of me to me. Friends would doodle on the wall of my bedroom, electric, gel-pen-adorned: cold, hard, evidence of love, the craters where it lived. I don't see my eventual anthropology degree as a coincidence. They could seem so mundane at their time of creation, but what I knew about the journal I knew about all of it, to some extent: that, all of a sudden, something’d be something else, and I would read them with this insatiability a little later in life. I was incredibly lost, like all young people are to some extent, and these people all allowed me, in their own ways, to become a sort of scholar of myself. I’m still stunned looking back on it all. [Relatively] grown now, I keep every card, every note, every shred–though I wish I’d kept more of the kid and adolescent stuff, too. All the reminders of who I am within that kind of relativity–that’s who I really am at my core. The ways I behave are relayed back to me through a game of telephone compound on each other and what sticks, ultimately, is the material with which I am filled. 

Hold a mirror up to me and I will run away from what I can, grasp the shards of what's left with a bleeding fist and heart. I took the love language quiz and it wasn't even close. To be held, to watch a day roll by where we saw no one else, yes–but being told about that day, reading about the ways in which I was held: it might run circles around the things themselves, if only because they feel like proof. Of confirmation that what I feel is real and deserves to leave the realm of unspoken. I know it's perverse. It's what I'm made of.

Romy Rhoads Ewing is a writer and photographer from Sacramento, California. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Bullshit Lit, fifth wheel press, BRAWL, HAD, Querencia Press, Nowhere Girl Collective, Anti-Heroin Chic, Major 7th Magazine, Y2K Quarterly, MEMEZINE, persephone’s fruit, UC Davis’s Open Ceilings Magazine, and Genrepunk Magazine. Her debut chapbook, please stay, was published by Bottlecap Press in 2024. She received her Bachelor of Arts in Child Development from Sacramento State University and also holds an Associate of Arts in Anthropology. She is currently studying Japanese.