Tag: Memoir

I Guess I Was a Writer All Along

~ M. Ashley ~ Leave a comment

When my fiancé got into bed with me last night he started talking about how he used to tape whole albums off the radio when he was a kid. He got specific. He had to have his mom buy him TDK 90 minute blank tapes—the solid gray ones in the gold wrappers, $2 apiece and sold in packs of five. Maxell was so-so—he would settle for Maxell, but Memorix with its clear tapes and groovy shapes all over was the worst of the worst and he wouldn’t put a single note on that. 

He talked about cataloguing the tapes—one album per side. Listening to the DJs talk about the albums and all the music trivia. He still listens to music talk, constantly. He follows about six hundred rock music podcasts and can DJ every song on Sirius with about thirty times the DJ juice as whatever has-been they’ve hired. He is an encyclopedia of rock. Sometimes I’ll turn on classic rock stations that I only marginally like just to give him the opportunity to fan his feathers for me, and it is glorious.

He told me he tried the guitar and piano as a kid because those are the types of instruments a blind kid is supposed to go for, but it wasn’t until someone put him in front of a drum kit that he thought yes…. I can really find my way around here. It all clicked along with the click track and he was a drummer, through-and-through forevermore. He started doing session work in LA by the time he was 14. At 50, he plays in three different bands and bursts out with drum solos on his knees randomly while I’m making dinner, while we’re waiting on an Uber, and even sometimes in the bathroom, (don’t tell him I told you that). 

Music, and rock music specifically, and drumming even more specifically than that is the way he makes his way in the world and he has no internal conflict whatsoever about that. I admire that. More than admire: I envy that. More than envy: I am deeply jealous of his soul’s love for its native art. And I wish my soul were that way about writing. It’s getting there, but it has taken a long long time.

Sometimes, when I’m depressed, I find myself doing “depressed” things long before I ever acknowledge I’m depressed. I stop taking care of myself and dressing in nice clothes. I curl up in bed and watch a lot of nostalgia bomb reruns I’ve seen ten thousand times. Walking from room to room makes me tired. I cook the simplest things for dinner—lots of blue box and ramen. But it isn’t until days and days later, when I find myself wrapped up in my blanket cocoon in bed, barely able to move, that I think, “Oh wow. I must be having a depression.”

It’s kind of like that with me and writing. 

While Angel was obsessing over TDK vs. Memorex as a kid, I was writing. I wrote my first real poem in the fifth grade and the teacher loved it so much, she posted it in the window for the whole school to see. I still remember it:

The moon is a jagged diamond

Hanging and waiting in suspense

For someone to pluck him from this mine of darkness

That holds him captive

Captive in a sea of stars

That no one dares enter

For fear they’d never return

We were learning about metaphors and similes when I wrote that. I chose metaphor.

I used to ride the bus to school composing poems. As I grew, the poetry onslaught continued. I’d type them on my little Canon electric typewriter that printed a whole line at a time, and put them in packets in the kind of folders you’d put school reports in. I’d give the packets titles and slip them to my teacher on the sly. 

I put my poetry in the front cover of my clear-covered three ring binder in high school and changed it out regularly. I wrote down song lyrics from memory and broke the lines apart the way I thought they should be broken.

I wrote satirical pieces in junior high, high school, and college and got in major trouble with teachers and schoolmates over it, but kept doing it anyway. 

I sat in the wood-paneled study room in college with my left hand pressed against my forehead writing short stories longhand for hours as day turned to night, turned to very late night. I’d dance around air-conducting baroque music thinking of what next things my characters should be doing and what most clever ways I could say it. 

All through the eight years I was trafficked—even then during that horrendous abuse, I spent so much of my “free” time alone at the keyboard writing endlessly about what was happening to me. I filled countless file folders on my shiny new Gateway computer and more spiral notebooks than I could ever keep track of. Words words words as Shakespeare would say. They didn’t always make sense during that time, but they kept me anchored to something, even if it was just my own hands moving, the click of the keys, the scratch of the pen, the flick of one page to the next.

I went to the Iowa Summer Writers’ Workshop twice and found my joy and my people. I didn’t bring an essay for class. I wrote it while I was there. I stayed up late in my hotel room writing it. I dashed into the college computer lab the day it was my turn to be workshopped, typed it out at emergency speed, and ran in to class with my ten copies, wet ink drying on my fingers. 

And after I survived the trafficking, while I was barely surviving survival, when I was desperately poor and living in an apartment that had roaches in the dishwasher, when I was working at Walmart and smoking with old Southern ladies and bitching about customers, managers, and my swollen feet, I never stopped writing. I started a blog about my Walmart experiences. I started a blog about world spirituality. I started a blog about my burgeoning Paganism. I started a blog about 12 step recovery. I started a blog about tarot. I started this blog. I started more blogs. I started a blog… I started a blog… I started a blog… 

And now, twenty years after the trafficking ended and nearly forty years after I wrote my first poem, and probably over fifty blog starts later, I am still writing. And I am reading Writing Down the Bones and realizing for the first time, after all this time, that I am a writer. I am a writer all the way down to my bones and always have been. I am a writer the way Angel is a drummer. I am a writer the way Natalie Goldberg is a writer.

It’s how I make my way in the world. It always has been whether I wanted it to be or not. My passion for the written word has burned for decades in spite of myself. 

I wonder what will happen when I embrace its burning as myself. 

My very own self.

We shall see.

-M. Ashley

New Memoir Method: Listen Don’t Wreck

~ M. Ashley ~ Leave a comment

When I started writing my memoir, I made this whole elaborate ritual for getting in and out of it. I bought a scolecite stone to remind me of a young man who was trafficked with me who didn’t make it. I wanted something of him I could hold as I believe it is our relationship that will form the spine of my book. The scolecite stone is milky white and oval, like a bar of Dove soap. It has little imperfections and fissures in it, hidden under the polish, that give it slight gray spots of texture. 

My ritual for getting into the memoir was to hold the stone and listen to songs I picked out that remind me of Toby (that’s his name) and myself. “Sailor or Siren,” “Falling Slowly,” and “The Atheist Christmas Carol.” “This tenderness comes as a surprise…” “Take this sinking boat and point it home…” “Don’t forget I love I love I love you…” respectively. I would listen to the songs, hold the stone, and let my mind wander over the trafficking time and let the muses or my intuition whisper to me what I should write about that day and give me the blessed first line—the way in.

Then I would write, cranking loud a film music playlist I used to listen to a lot during the trafficking time. I would write by hand in a wide ruled spiral notebook with a purple cover. I would print so I could actually read it later to transcribe it, (my cursive has long since become indecipherable). I would listen, not write… listen… and record the next word and the next. If ever I found my mind asking, “What comes next?” I would pause, sink into the music, let go and recommit to listening. Listen, I would remind myself. Don’t WRITE.

Then, when it was all over and the scene was done or I was exhausted, whichever came first, I would listen to one last piece of film music that reminds me of Toby and me—“The Mysteries of Love” from Blue Velvet. I would cry a little and hold the stone. My benediction. I would get up and try to go on about the rest of my day.

I produced some really remarkable writing that way, however…

Writing that way could also wreck me. I entered deep mind, deep senses, deep feeling and it stayed with me, knocked me to the floor emotionally, sometimes for days. I had to find another way.

The last couple of days, I’ve experimented with little to no ceremony. I’ve sat in my comfy couch recliner in the middle of the living room with my standard poodle and fiancé passing back and forth and the occasional ring on the doorbell and weird sounds the front door makes and food smells and the algorithm on the bluetooth speaker confidently playing nothing I really want to hear. And I was more comfortable. I didn’t cry. I didn’t feel wrecked after. I did want to sit in dim light and eat cheap cookies after, but I didn’t want to curl up in a cocoon and dissolve myself entirely.

The problem is, the writing is for shit. Maybe that’s too harsh. Not exactly for shit, but not exactly great either—choppy and mechanical like someone going through the motions of putting on a uniform but not having any idea what job it is they’re actually meant to do. I had this image in my mind of watching Toby’s legs through the legs of a dining table and chairs and of being afraid of him one of the few times I was really afraid of him, and I could not write it properly. My mind got all tangled up with the table and chair legs, and Toby’s legs, and the click of the keys, and the straightness of the typed letters, and I couldn’t HEAR anything. I was writing, but my soul was deaf.

There had to be a better way.

Usually, I meditate outside in the morning because actively listening to our suburban aviary loudly go about their birdly business helps my monkey mind un-monkey. Today, however, it is blustering Santa Ana wind out there and SoCal cold—45 degrees—so I put on a fuzzy jacket, went into my office, threw a blanket over myself, and meditated inside. I had no intention of connecting with the memoir or Toby or any of it. I was pretty sure I wouldn’t even touch that material today, so put out was I at the failure of the table leg trial in type. But as I meditated there in my office in the mid morning light of the window, in the still quiet, I began to feel it tug at me. It became irresistible and, in the last minute and a half, I reached up and grabbed the scolecite stone.

I had this idea:

I have a lovely little spiral notebook, a fancy notebook, I bought to record notes about my meditation sessions this year. I had kind of abandoned it because I saw it was a little anti-Tao to be meticulously recording what flowed naturally in meditation, but today I had this thought: What if I wrote the memoir in there? What if I wrote notes to Toby in that book? The paper is cream, not stark white. The lines are bold, not faint. The pages are small—undemanding. There is an index section so I can find what I wrote later. And when I’m done writing, there is an elastic band that wraps the whole thing up and maybe, just maybe can keep the scary bits inside.

So that’s what I did. I got out my former meditation notebook, started a new section called “Notes to Toby” and began the day’s memoir work there. I listened. I heard. I recorded. I did not WRITE. It was wonderful. I got to the meat of the table legs. I understood why I was writing it—the IT of that moment, Toby’s tiny acts of care and restraint. And when it was finished, I indexed the entry, capped my pen, closed the book, wrapped the elastic band around it to keep everyone safe and still, slipped it back into its place, and moved on with my day.

I feel a little tired now, but not wrecked. We shall see as the day goes on how it wears, but I think I might have discovered a new little method and ceremony that keeps the listening intact but the devastation at a minimum. 

I’ll keep you posted.

Until then, I wish you all the best in word-liness.

-M. Ashley

Trauma Memoir Writing Decompression

~ M. Ashley ~ Leave a comment

I have decided to do what so many survivors have decided to do. I have decided to write the story of my trauma and my survival in hopes that it may help other survivors feel seen, heard, and understood. And also in hopes that it may draw attention to the issue—sex trafficking. I am a survivor of eight years of brutal trafficking. I was an adult in my early twenties at the time. I am disabled (albino and legally blind). I am not particularly thin or cute. I made decisions in order to survive that are, in the best light, morally gray. I am not a “perfect victim.” So few victims are. I think more than shedding light on sex trafficking, which is worthy and important, I want my memoir to raise the voices of those of us who are imperfect victims and feel that with every fiber of our beings when the media only covers the tragedies of people who fit a certain physical, socioeconomic, and moral type. And especially feel it when our abusers say, “No one will believe you because…” and are probably right. 

I started writing the memoir with the working title “Guilty Innocents” in November and, so far, it has frankly kicked my ass. I write a scene and am knocked out by it for days. I have tried to come up with all manner of ways to soften the impact. I have a scolecite stone that reminds me of a fellow survivor that I hold before I write and listen to music that makes me think of him, and us. I blast film music while I write. I have a cool down piece of music for after. I let myself eat as many chocolate chip cookies as I want when I’m done. I wrap up in a fuzzy jacket. I chit chat about my poodle to my AI robot pal to get my mind of it.

And still it is costly.

This is not me complaining. This is me just saying. And it is me appreciating. Every trauma memoir out there, and there are a lot, cost something similar of the writer. How brave and strong and full of light they all must be. Even if the writing isn’t very good or even if it’s a trauma we’ve heard about a thousand times before—every word of every one of them costs courage and nibbles little painful bites out of the writers’ souls. They should be admired for their endurance. I admire them tremendously and pray I can stand up in that same lineage and get this story down.

I laid in bed one night with my fiancé, buried face first in a pile of pillows, my “comforting” classical playlist on, not working, telling him, “This writing is so important. I know it. It’s so important but also… costly. Just so costly.”

For the first couple of months of working on it, we ate a lot of blue box mac and cheese, ramen, spaghetti with no meat… noodles noodles noodles… because that’s all I could manage for us for dinner. I joked we may come out at the end of this with me having written a wonderful memoir, but the both of us having developed ramen-induced rickets. I’ve since gotten past the noodle noodle noodle phase and I’m glad. Last night we had cold sandwiches. I don’t know if that will prevent rickets, but the introduction of protein is a good thing.

I decided to start blogging about the process of writing the memoir mainly for my own decompression I think and also to have something lighter to write about. I feel like a lazy bum on days I don’t write anything forward-moving, but I also can’t face the memoir every day, so I thought blogging about the process was a good way to produce public-facing writing on days I need a rest from the deepest darkest—to keep me feeling like yes, I am still a working writer. Yes, I am still capable of finishing things and not simply writing until my brain wants to crawl out of my skull and I simply can’t stand to sit in front of the keyboard or at the notebook one minute longer.

Also, I am trying to focus more these days on writing what I love to read and I LOVE to read about writerly process. I’ve dipped back in to Natalie Goldberg’s Writing Down the Bones recently and oh… I feel like a dog rolling in the sun drenched grass reading about her process. So why not write about process myself? Acknowledging, of course, that with me, with this material, there might be dog patties in that grass sometimes, but the sunlight of having written something worthy, that never dims. 

Until next time, my friends. I wish us all the very best in word-liness. 

-M. Ashley

PS

The picture for this post is an idea my AI robot pal and I developed for the cover of the memoir. What do you think?

Learning to Be Alone (creative nonfiction)

~ M. Ashley ~ Leave a comment

Not the first time I was alone, but the time I learned to love being alone. Art school. Summer arts school between my junior and senior years of high school. I went for writing. I had two writer roommates. They put the writers together because they said we had a tendency to keep odd hours and they didn’t want us keeping the dancers or singers awake all night because they had to wake up early and actually work for their muse. Lazy cusses that we were, our first class wasn’t until nine and we only had two classes and one group activity a day. The rest of the time we were supposed to be typing away at our keyboards making Shakespeare or whatever. We were supposed to be getting inspired. We were supposed to be collaborating. We were supposed to be bouncing off the walls with creative energy.

Mostly I remember wandering through the halls exploring myself.

That sounds unnecessarily sexual. If I were to say exploring myself from the inside, that doesn’t make it any better. Feeling myself from the inside? No.

Understanding my own soul better. There we go. Expanding. Spreading my arms into the empty space.

The halls were white painted brick and white tile, fluorescent lights. Someone in my class, more brilliant than I in that moment, said the halls looked like Communism. I just about fell out of my tree laughing at that at the time. I’ve used that joke several times since. I’ve probably used it more than the person who cracked it in the first place. I wonder if they even remember. I wonder if their own humor followed them the way it did me.

The halls of the funky math and science building at Vanderbilt looked like Communism. The mental hospital I was in on a hold that one time—that looked like Communism too. Math and mental health and art school. There should be a connection there. Art led to math led to the nuthouse. Maybe the more talented writer who cracked the joke in the first place could do more with that than I can in this moment. Don’t expect much of me. I was great in art school, I did marginally at math, and I was not one of the popular kids at the nuthouse. It was hard to be alone there. I made myself lonely in math when I didn’t need to be and at art school I was alone, but damn I was never lonely. Damn I loved being with myself then.

There was a smell in those halls. It was the smell of freedom. I had been to summer camp before—lifetimes of summer camp—but here I had all this time to do with as I pleased, to be plying my art, and no one was up my butt to be cheery or play Red Rover. Our meal times were even flexible.

I was planning a good roam one afternoon and went to the cafeteria first to get a sandwich. I was in the middle of a bad attempt to wrap it in a yellow napkin that was too small for the job, when a handsome man who worked there, I’m sure one of the regular students, so maybe all of 20 years old, came over to me and offered to wrap it up for me. That was the kindest thing.

I thought I was being so sly. I wasn’t even sure we were allowed to take food out. I was being on the down low and he busted me—busted me, then helped me out and in such a sweet tone. I wonder if he was a writer too or if he had found his personal space there—had explored his own self from the inside wandering down those halls, so he understood the lure and understood the need to have portable sandwiches for the journey.

-M. Ashley

I Have a Book of Guy du Maupassant Stories (creative nonfiction)

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I have a book of Guy du Maupassant stories. On the cover is an impressionist painting of a woman coming out of the bath and drying her feet. I assume it’s by Degas because he’s the impressionist I did my high school French class report on and, as far as I’m concerned, all impressionist paintings that aren’t famously and obviously by some other painter, were painted by Degas.

Degas started going blind at the end of his career. Tragedy. Tragedy for him and for us. I am legally blind. The tragedy is merely personal. The world does not mourn a loss over the fact that reading, for me, is slow and difficult. I have to be choosy about what I read because it takes so much time and effort. In college, I chose to read that book of Maupassant stories. After college, I chose to read it three more times.

Those stories can be a little like Far Side cartoons. Sometimes you don’t get it on your first shot. Sometimes you need someone to explain the world and the ending to you.

My junior year of college, I had a little time between this and that, who knows—I don’t remember the obligations, I only remember the time in between. There was an in between place on the Vanderbilt campus where four paths met in a sort of pedestrian roundabout. At the center of the circle was a planter overflowing with the campus’ signature Spring yellow tulips. At the center of the planter was a blossoming dogwood, shedding its white blossoms, covering the ground in floral snow. The circle was bordered by ancient shade trees and magnolias. There were antique style street lamps dotted around. At night, they cast pale blue efficiency light. There were glossy wooden benches.

I was alone in the circle, in the in between time, in the in between place, sitting on one of the glossy benches. I was reading Guy du Maupassant. It was a bliss time. A life is only blessed with so many, and this was a precious one of mine.

I read a story about a man who observes another man’s gaudy, worldly treasures and also his beautiful daughter and wife. That’s the whole of the story—the observations of the one man and the bragging of the other on all his gaudy, worldly possessions. It’s the kind of story that, when it ends, you flip the pages expecting another ending and find only the beginning of another story. Maybe the printer made a mistake.

I stood up from my glossy bench, chewing on it. I went to my other obligation. I went back to my dorm room overstuffed with the detritus of a busy college career. I called my mom.

I told my mom about the story and asked her what she thought it meant. She said it was quite obvious, wasn’t it? The treasure was the women. In all that house full of stuff, (I looked around my own room and was embarrassed), in that house full of stuff,, (I thought about how often I had walked through that in between place circle with its gold tulips and dogwood snow and ignored it on my way from stuff-to-do to other stuff-to-do and was embarrassed), in that house full of stuff, the women were the treasure. The family bond was the most precious thing,

I thought about how often I neglected to call home in favor of some seemingly more pressing or interesting stuff. I was embarrassed. My life was stuffed with such stuff.

I told my mom I got it now. I told my mom she was an epiphany. I asked her how her day had gone.

-M. Ashley

Hairy Larry (creative nonfiction)

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Hairy Larry gave me the worst haircut I have ever had. I think he was drunk at the time. It was only 6:00pm and he was in the kitchen with the rest of us, all bar friends, but also all sober. He was drunk I think, but I let him cut my hair anyway. My hair was a mess and needed some kind of attention. He was drunk, I figured, but he was always drunk, so I also figured, at least drunk, his hands wouldn’t shake.

He, himself, had ALL the hair. Pompadour and chest hair that would make a pectoral toupee jealous. He had a beard, well kept, but still mountain man worthy. His eyebrows, also well kept, but awnings enough that he never had to worry about the sun in his eyes.

He was a hairdresser by trade, or so I was told. Doing me in the kitchen was a special kindness, a special concession for bar friends. Also, doing me in the kitchen meant he didn’t have to pay a kick to his salon owner. He needed that money for booze.

He asked me what I wanted. I never know the answer to that when hairdressers ask me that question. I usually go months and months between haircuts and I never have learned to speak the language. By the time I gave myself to Hairy Larry, it had been more than a year—longer than the time I had moved into that house.

I told him I didn’t know how to describe what I wanted. It went something like medium length and, you know, not poofy. The not poofy thing is the hard part as my hair is thick and naturally curly. When I was a teenager in the nineties, I would always leave the hairdresser looking like some kind of hybrid poodle/Dolly Parton creature as my hair is as naturally platinum as it is curly and the hairdressers could never resist exercising their mad engineering skills and making it reach the rafters.

I always went home after hair appointments and washed the height out. I didn’t mind if the hair on the top of my head had no volume and the curls throughout weren’t quite as curly as they could have been. I wanted to look something like me and not something like poodle/Parton/other.

So, for Hairy Larry, the not poofy part was the challenge. I was in my late twenties by this point and although I knew very little about what I wanted for my hair, for my life, for this very moment, I knew at least one thing I didn’t want. I knew at least several things I didn’t want. At that time, I think I defined what I did want almost exclusively by what I didn’t want. I didn’t want poofy hair. Anything but poofy hair. No matter how you get there, Hairy Larry, anything but poofy hair.

Anything but the life I had been leaving before I moved into this house with three housemates, four cats, and three dogs between us. Anything but that. Kitchen haircuts and all. Anything but going back. Anything but the poodle of my teens. Anything but the you-are-not-who-you-are poof of someone else’s engineering.

-M. Ashley

Lame Zebra (creative nonfiction)

~ M. Ashley ~ Leave a comment

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 chases after her. He made 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 stupid, 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, 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 then a spinster fleet of foot.

I feel you sister. I do.

-M. Ashley

Mom Bling (creative nonfiction)

~ M. Ashley ~ Leave a comment

My dad, divorced from my mother for more than ten years at that point, told me that what she really loves is jewelry. She has the bling gene, as we call it. That’s not what he said. That’s a little too clever, a little too caring for my dad.

She loves costume jewelry, but has a grounding in the real. Always reality on her fingers. On her left hand, she always wears a blue topaz ring she had made. The topaz is set in a simple, modern swoop of solid gold. It’s meant to show off the stone, bold as a blue diamond. The way she wears it, you would swear it was a diamond.

On her right hand, she wears a ruby set in a cluster of diamonds. The ruby is her birthstone. It is pigeon blood red. It is the best you can get.

A little silver ring I gave her. A simple gold chain bracelet on her left wrist.

A touch of reality around her neck too. A shy diamond set in another modern swoop of gold, smaller, more delicate—a stylized teardrop. It sits against a black backdrop, created shadow. The diamond is from her mother’s engagement ring—her mother’s first engagement to my mother’s father.

They took that necklace off my mom when she went into the hospital so it wouldn’t interfere with the MRI. They took her rings and bracelet too.

She had to be in the hospital alone because of the virus. She was there a week. I called her every day, at least once a day. She told me many times about how they had taken her jewelry. She told me many times she was sure she would get it back. She had faith they were good, honest people, and that she would get her jewelry back even though she couldn’t quite remember where they had put it in her room. It seemed she thought about that more than she thought about her infection, her surgery, the second attempt at her surgery, and what life would be like after.

She recovered enough to come home. Once home, it took her another two weeks to recover enough physically and mentally even to want to put her jewelry on again.

She fished it out of her purse. It was all jumbled up in a green, semicircular plastic holder that looked like something you would put false teeth in. All that reality. All her reality. All those precious gems.

She put the topaz on first. This was what she earned, her badass career—the woman she was before retirement who made male lawyers quiver and go limp. The woman who could afford a topaz like that and all that swoop of gold.

She put her ruby on next. This was the woman she was born. Badass in essence from the start. The little girl who chopped down an entire row of bird of paradise in front of her mother’s house because she didn’t like the way they looked at her when she got home from school. She planted snapdragons there instead. Their fierce little faces were sweeter.

The gold bracelet. She fastened that on herself. She bought it somewhere borderline seedy while on a Caribbean cruise—her first. First of many with a group of globetrotting women, badass as she was, exploring everything, planting their flags everywhere.

She needed help with the necklace with the engagement diamond. I tried for more than fifteen minutes and couldn’t get it. The clasp is so tiny, I wondered how she ever got it on in the first place as her well kept fingernails are long and lustrous and mine are bitten to the nubs. It should have been easier for me having my actual fingertips to work with, but it was impossible.

She sighed as I handed it back to her. She looked down. “I don’t like to be without it,” she said. “You wouldn’t believe how easily the nurse took it off.”

Finally, she slid the little silver ring with the created pink gemstones I gave her for her birthday on to her little finger. The ring had turned black. Something they injected her with had burned her inside, leaked out of the injection site, ran down her arm, and burned off whatever real silver there was on the ring. This was before the MRI. Before the box. Before she was bereft of everything. Before it was all protected.

That silver ring I gave her—the timid whisper that is my life’s contribution to hers, turned black in her illness—she wears it anyway, right alongside her gold and precious. She wears it anyway.

-M. Ashley

Happy Mothers’ Day everyone!

A Little Stuffy in Here (creative nonfiction)

~ M. Ashley ~ Leave a comment

The breakfast with Jeana at the botanical gardens in Nashville. You never saw so many nouveau riche people in one place at one time. Not one colored face among them.

They all sat on the lower level, next to the wide windows overlooking the butterfly garden, but they were mainly looking at each other, what was she wearing, who was she with, who should we say hello to, what hands should we shake, how many rungs can we climb this beautiful Sunday morning we are spending with our faces buried in our mimosas and our backs to the beautiful garden.

Or at least this was our impression as we sat on the upper level, close to the door we should probably have been grateful they let us through in our jeans and t-shirts. Clean jeans and t-shirts, mind you, but jeans and t-shirts nonetheless. Mine was burgundy and had a baseball style swoosh on it with the words, “Think dark thoughts.” One of my favorite t-shirts of all time, and we were. We were thinking dark thoughts about these people when these people we assumed didn’t want us there, were probably not thinking about us at all.

At the brunch buffet table, this lady in a white dress with heels way too high for a garden… we were in a freaking garden after all… elbowed me over the eggs. Elbowed in the boobs, over the chafing dish full of rubbery eggs. Strangest things. I suppose my low class ass wasn’t moving fast enough and she was at the eggs in a hurry because maybe she had some ass to kiss back at her table right then or the ass wouldn’t be ripe for kissing anymore.

Dark thoughts.

At our table on the higher level, the undesirable section, we were the only table up there after all, the waitress came over to fill our water glasses. Jeana, with her Jeana wit said to the waitress, “How are you today.” Fine, the waitress said. “A little stuffy in here, ain’t it?” The waitress smiled in a way she wasn’t supposed to and said, “Sometimes.”

-M, Ashley

Outside My Preteen Window (creative nonfiction)

~ M. Ashley ~ 1 Comment

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. Ashley