Category: Creative Nonfiction

Natively Unquiet

~ M. Ashley ~ Leave a comment

Tell me about silence.

If you threw the Empire State Building into a raging sea, no one would know the difference. Deepak Chopra said something like that, advocating for meditation. I bet the people of New York would know the difference–their skyline sadly quieter again.

But not silent.

There is no such thing. Like time and god, it’s something we conceptualize, track our lives by, aspire to. But there is always some sound. There is always some imperfection. Our own breath. Our own heartbeat. The mortal body regulating itself as it slowly, calmly perishes.

And that’s not a bad thing. Humans will never be gods and humans will also never know silence or be silent. We are the creatures we are, natively, and we are an unsubtle, noisy lot.

When I try to be silent, movies related to the logistics of eternity flicker across the insides of my eyelids. I’ve learned (sometimes) to watch and not participate, like seekers of silence and stillness are supposed to do, but even when the films are silent films, there is still the sound of the flickering, still the hum of electricity to projector that bolts through the physical brain. The slapstick of memory and trauma and dream and inspiration plays itself out and I laugh. As silent as I am, as unmoving as my belly and throat are–still there is the laugh.

That’s probably the foundational sound of the universe–the breath and heartbeat sound even she can’t get away from when she curves back into herself to resettle before birthing herself, from herself, again.

-M.

Boys at the Window

~ M. Ashley ~ Leave a comment

What was outside your bedroom window?

(Doing this exercise from the phone today as our TV broke and my family has commandeered my iPad to watch Star Wars. A little weird, but I like it because I get to be lazy and lie in bed while I write. On to it.)

I’ve lived in three of the four bedrooms of the house I grew up in. I started at the end of the hall, moved across the hall to the front of the house, then back across the hall to the biggest of the little bedrooms, at last. When I lived in the bedroom at the front of the house, my window looked out on the walk, the lawn, the sidewalk, the streetlight that was supposed to be orange but was always broken, the street, the across-the-street neighbor’s house, and the across-the-street neighbor’s house’s front windows–their living room and a little square bedroom just like mine.

I slept with the head of my bed up against the window. I liked to look out through the blinds at night and contemplate the mysteries of junior high vis a vis the mysteries of the mostly empty street, an unhurried car passing once in a great while.

One night, my boyfriend and two of his friends came to the window. They whispered and laughed and sang and coaxed me out without permission. I think it might have been all of 10:00pm. We were doing what good kids walking the razor sharp line between good kids and slightly less good kids do. We thought we were stealing the world. It’s good we thought that.

Just now the thought: I have had romantic experiences in my lifetime after all, or at least this one–and the several times after that it also happened once they figured out I was so easily persuaded. Once they figured out I was just bad enough.

I came to expect them. I prepared myself for it. I dressed. I made sure my hair was ok, but not too ok. When my best friend came to my house for a sleepover, I made sure her clothes and hair were also ok, but not too ok. She was the best of the good kids. To her, we really were stealing the world. She looked afraid when I told her they would come. She went along anyway.

-M.

Exceptional Vehicles

~ M. Ashley ~ Leave a comment

Let’s talk about driving. What goes unnoticed? What do we take for granted?

All you people take driving for granted.

I can’t drive because I’m legally blind and it is one of the most horrible kinds of crippling, or at least I imagine it is. Having never been an independent driver, I wouldn’t know.

I don’t know what it’s like to have a notion to go somewhere and just go. Cold night, playing Freeze Out like my dad used to do with us girls in the car—all four windows down, whoever rolls theirs up last is the winner—but with only myself as competition. I’ve never had to keep myself awake with only myself and the double yellow lolling out endlessly before me in the dark dark desert between here and Las Vegas.

I don’t know what hitting 100mph is like on that same highway, in the middle of the night, when I’m sure the CHP isn’t watching.

Yellow line, lulling you to sleep. Blaring the radio to fight it, Botts’ dots rumbling your eyes open again. The danger. The responsibility. The irresponsibility. The win when you get there somehow, miraculously, safe.

I wish I could stand somewhere alone that I drove to alone that I decided to drive to alone, and that no one but me, alone, would know about it.

Freedom. A grass is greener freedom as my side of the fence is on foot or riding the bus or in a cab or mooching rides from patient friends.

It’s hard to be independent when your broader movements are, by necessity, dependent—when, at the very least, the bus driver is going to know where you came from, where you went, and, if you ride enough, most of what your story is.

I sound bitter.

I am a little bitter.

No one to blame but the DNA. I was born wing-clipped in Southern California. Apparently my genetic material never heard the song “Nobody Walks in LA,” or heard it and thought we would be the exception.

Special genes do make one exceptional.

I am exceptionally half-sighted. I am exceptionally good at scheduling my errands around my friends’ errands so I don’t trouble anybody too much.

I am exceptionally blessed with the gift of the gab and, by lack of automotive freedom, have gained masses of unlikely friends all over the country because of it. There is not much else to do when you’re stuck in transit together, breathing each other’s air, than to become compatriots.

Rwandan refugee cab drivers in Nashville—that ride share guy in DC who asked me what color palm trees are—the Uber lady whose dog just died yesterday—the bus driver who wouldn’t take my ticket without putting on gloves first (she was new and we weren’t virus-stricken yet)—the disability cabbie who brought his family along at eleven at night to pick me up from work, his wife sweetly piping up into the conversation from the back—the Pakistani guy who asked me to marry him—the Russian guy who also asked me to marry him—that other guy who asked me to use my employee discount to buy him a coffee pot “for church.”

I suppose all of these, in truth, are my own kind of exceptional vehicle and, once-in-a-while bilious drivers’ envy aside, my clipped-freedom grass is brilliant green because of them.

-M.

It Grows and Grows

~ M. Ashley ~ Leave a comment

Talk about disease.

It puts me ill at ease when my mom starts talking about my grandparents’ cancer—how they were dying at the same time, in hospital rooms next to each other. Lung cancer.

They smoked together. I’m sure he lit her cigarettes when they were dating. A sexy gesture. A sexy pull. Firsthand smoke to firsthand smoke. Breathing in each other’s breaths. Secondhand to secondhand. Thirdhand smoke in each other’s clothes. They breathed it in when they were dancing close.

Thirdhand smoke in their clothes still, even their clean clothes that my mother had to divvy up amongst relatives or donate after they passed. You never really can get rid of the smoke, the breath, the illness, the cancer. It grows and grows.

My mother’s marriage was falling apart as her parents were dying. My father was useless.

One day, after having worked a full day and spending most of the evening sitting at her parents’ bedsides, my mom came home to find that my father had put my sister and I to bed in our day clothes. She tells me he didn’t even bother to take our shoes off. That’s the part she couldn’t get over.

Unemployed and couldn’t be bothered to take our shoes off.

Unemployed and he would do the laundry at three in the morning with all the lights on in the house and Hank Williams roaring from the record player.

She wasn’t spending her evenings with him. He couldn’t throw a toddler’s tantrum, so he chose Hank Williams instead and, “You did say you wanted me to do the laundry, didn’t you?”

The cancer grew and grew.

My grandparents died and my mom got a divorce in the same year.

I once asked my mom if she was glad my grandparents weren’t around to see her get divorced. I asked her if there was some relief in it for her—in their passing. I don’t remember how she answered. I know she spoke, but all I really remember is the silence while she thought about it.

-M.

Lesser Sickness

~ M. Ashley ~ Leave a comment

Tell us about a sickness you once had.

My pediatrician just about whalloped my mom after listening to my lungs and determining I had pneumonia. My mom hadn’t believed me when I said I was sick. I had asked to stay home from school, day after day, and she pushed me out the door anyway, thinking it was just another case of chronic truancy, from which I had suffered mightily my freshman year.

I remember geometry class. I sat at a group table by myself and put my head down in my arms. I coughed and sweat and almost fell asleep before the coughing woke me up again. Two dudes I didn’t know walked by on their way up to the front of the room to talk to Mr. Wahl. One dude said to the other, “Why is she like that?” The other one said, “Because she’s sick. Can’t you see?”

Weird my mom didn’t see.

That makes me want to get into all the other things my mom didn’t see, but then we start getting into blind Freudian territory and I don’t particularly want to go there.

Tell me about your mother.

I don’t want to go there.

I’d rather focus on how I felt vindicated when my doctor announced I had pneumonia and not a case of the terrible truancy. One of only a handful of times I can remember actually being happy to be sick.

Speaking of psychoanalysis:

Have you ever wished you were sick, like physical sick, so you would know for sure what the hell was wrong with you? Have you ever wished you were sick, physically sick, so you would have a clear explanation for why you feel like shit all the time and a clear method to fight it?

Sometimes, when I’m very blue, I imagine myself in the hospital and…

I just realized how gross and self-indulgent it is to talk that way when people are dying of the virus. Why my mind didn’t go there first is beyond me. Blind Freudian territory again. Perhaps I’ve quarantined my head too far up my own ass to remember why I’m quarantining in the first place. It does things to the mental health. It brings a lesser sickness, or, in my case, exacerbates the lesser sickness that already was.

Truancy, I suppose, is a lesser sickness than pneumonia. Tough loving your children is a lesser sickness than ignoring them completely. Depressive narcissism is a pretty bad sickness, but a lesser sickness than the actually dying have.

The actually dying of the virus at hand. We are all actually dying. Most of us aren’t newsworthy, at least not to the nation.

This took a darker turn than I intended it to. Mostly I wanted to champion myself to the world that, in 1993, in the autumn, Michelle actually was sick despite what her mother thought.

Let it be known.

-M.

Running Ahead

~ M. Ashley ~ Leave a comment

When did you know you were going to suffer, but you went ahead anyway?

Something as mundane as I found out he was courting other women, and yet I went on, enmeshed, with him anyway.

Courting is a nice word for manipulating. Affairs of the imagination, choosing which flesh to realize.

I sat in the car with a friend after finding out. Devastated. She told me it isn’t the lame zebra’s fault for being lame. It’s the asshole lion’s fault for going after lame zebras. I didn’t mind her calling me lame. I was lamer than that. Lame was an understatement. I was more like hobbled. The asshole lion the kind of asshole that hobbles the naive zebra then makes her sport—makes her an easy catch.

I told my friend I was done. We arrived at my house and, in the dark, in my driveway, before opening the car door to let myself out, I told her I was done with him. That was it and it was over and I was done.

She patted my head and said sympathetically, “No you’re not.” A sentence of death and destruction and many, many more months of eating my heart out.

It sounds cliched, but time was the only thing that healed it. Time and he got married to one of his other lame zebras. He said she made him feel like a teenager again. That’s likely because she was the worst hobbled amongst us and, compared to her, he could run like the wind.

He wrote to me, “Since I’ve been with her, I’ve been running. Can you imagine? Me? At my age? Running?”

I wonder how long that lasted before she gave up and he, at his age, convinced her life was easier sitting, limp and licking his chops as she puts on weight and wonders what happened to her legs that used to run so swiftly and kick so high.

I took up running myself a few years later and I’m faster now than I ever was. I have no hurt for him anymore. I hurt for her. I’m sure I won’t be seeing her at any local, smalltime races anytime soon. The LA Marathon is bound to miss her as well. She might have wanted to do that before she was forty only a little less than she was terrified she wouldn’t be married by then.

Better wed and walking than a spinster fleet of foot.

I feel you sister. I do.

-M
(Ten minute writing exercise from the book Old Friend from Far Away.)