I hope this is the last time my Tired ass leaves the seat of This gray vinyl hospital chair Turned forty-five degrees to My mother’s gray blanketed Hospital bed. She’s being Discharged today to better things I hope.
Today—leaving day— Is the first day I noticed there is Color in this room. I have nothing Poetry profound to say about This presence—the coral and blue. Nothing you can carry in your pocket when Your mom attempts slow suicide too by Refusing to eat—to comfort you. To Reckon the anger. All the anger.
Except to say the color is there. The color is there, aloof Of whether you see it or not.
But do see it. See the color. It’s there.
-M. Ashley photo taken at Kaiser Ontario Hospital, Ontario, CA
My first Christmas in my first apartment alone, trying to be a big time grownup, I made French onion soup for Christmas dinner. I called home to California earlier in the day. I had read a scripture, I told my mom, something about getting my house in order, and I felt I needed to do that, which involved me staying in Nashville for Christmas, again, alone. She wasn’t convinced, but because she couldn’t fly out and physically drag me back home, she accepted it.
I was trying to be so adult. I was trying to prove something, though, looking back, I can’t imagine what. Was I trying to prove that I could withstand severe holiday depression? Was I trying to prove that no matter how badly I wanted to off myself that season, I didn’t need my family to help me not become a statistic?
I called my Hungarian violin teacher after I called my family. He was a big part of my life then as music was a big part of my life and also because I adored his stories of escaping communism and how the communists used to make the Hungarians eat diseased cow meat and chocolate made from blood. Zsolt was also disappointed I wasn’t coming home. He seemed put off by my choice of Christmas dinner. He said, “Well, maybe you could float an ornament in it and make it more Christmasy that way.” I laughed and felt lonelier by the minute.
God I was miserable then—a miserable sort of miserable that radiated in waves across the country from Nashville to my little burg in California called “Berdoo.”
I was new to keeping my own appliances then, just as I was new to keeping my own household in general. For example, while I had used a garbage disposal many times as a kid growing up, I somehow never learned that putting onion skins down one is not such a great idea. By the time I had all the onions in the Christmas soup pot sautéing with butter, beginning to oddly smell like apples the closer they came to caramelizing, my garbage disposal was filled to brimming with onion skins.
I ran the water which began to fill the sink and turned the thing on. It growled like a demon but the water didn’t go down. It began to spit up chopped onion skins in great belches making of the sink water a slimy, stinky soup of its own. I stopped the thing. “That was not bright,” I told myself.
I grudgingly lugged my plunger into the kitchen from the bathroom. In retrospect, it is amazing I had a plunger given that, when I first moved it, I somehow hadn’t realized until I was in dire need that toilet paper doesn’t grow on the roll.
I stuck the plunger to the drain and plunged for dear life. More and more onion skins belched forth from the disposal along with other unspeakable things most likely from tenants past. I sucked everything out of there I could, then turned the thing on, having thought there was something stuck and I had by the sweat of my plunging arm dislodged it.
The water didn’t go down. The chopped up onion skin and unnamable goop mocked me as it danced its spiral dance around the sink.
I ended up having to strain all that onion skin and other detritus out of the sink with my bare hand, letting the water slip through, but retaining the chunks that clung to my fingers. I pulled the trash can up next to me and went to town. I think a year might have gone by.
The sink came clean, the water went down, and the garbage disposal growled happily, its gut no longer sick.
I washed by hands at least three times. I washed the plunger. I raised the plunger over my head and made He-Man muscles.
“I am the Garbage Disposal Master of the Universe!” I proclaimed to my empty apartment. The high ceiling echoed back at me.
“I am the Garbage Disposal Master of the Universe!” I shouted again. The ceiling repeated it.
I lowered my plunger and shrugged my shoulders. Shoving the onion skins down the disposal was not the only terrible mistake I made that lonely Christmas. Not by a long shot.
Maybe I should be out Loud about it. Maybe I Should talk. I know it Sure would have helped me A lot if the woman they Kept in a box under the Bed for seven years had Been a little more chatty.
“These things do happen. They Do.” We would commiserate With each other through the Knothole in her box and the Keyhole in the door I was Locked and chained behind
Also for seven years.
Lucky lucky.
“Colleen,” I would whisper so The bad men wouldn’t hear.
Colleen whose name means Girl
“Colleen,” I would whisper “I get you Sister. I do.”
-M. Ashley
If you are a survivor of sex trafficking, I cannot recommend the organization Journey Out enough. They have helped me tremendously and I am grateful every day that I found them.
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.
I moped around a lot. I saw Dr. Sexy. I told him I moped around a lot. He tinkered with my psych meds. We added more of the one that makes me feel like I have the flu for a few hours—the one that’s supposed to treat Parkinson’s but is not diagnostic, thank all the gods for that. It didn’t help—hasn’t helped. Summer is almost over and I’m still moping around.
I bought a blue lamp to help with my blues. I decided I get summer SAD. If that isn’t a thing, I invented it just now and that’s another thing I did this summer.
I bought a blue lamp to help with my blues because, being albino, all this goddamned sun gives me the blues. I get up in the dark and draw the drapes when the sun comes out because summer sun is brutal even through a window shaded by mock orange and concrete. In other words, I’m in the dark a lot. That’s another thing I did this summer: I was in the dark. A lot.
And my drapes are tinted maroon, so it’s red light all day and, as I am not a bat, red light makes me want to sleep instead of invigorating me to spread my wings and fly away, fly away, fly away. (I went to a Queen concert too this summer. Did you catch the reference, or did it fly away?)
So the blue light is to combat the red light of the no-light room I spend most of my time in, writing writing writing. Plugging away. Doing yarn crafts.
I’m making latch hook stockings for friends for Christmas. I’m making a wall hanging depicting foxes in a forest for a family of Foxes for their collective birthdays in November. I’m making a latch hook draft dodger for a friend’s mother. I’m making a penguin tree skirt. I’m making another wall hanging, this one of cardinals, for another friend for Christmas. I have no idea how to properly finish any of it, especially the round things. I’m going to have to learn to sew. That’s another thing I did this summer: started about twenty new projects and gave myself a reason to learn how to sew.
Of course, there is also iron-on binding and I could have merely given myself twenty reasons to learn how to iron in a straight line, but that’s not nearly as sexy, so let’s stick to the sewing thing.
My mother was in the hospital for a few days which meant I had to be a real grown up adult for a while—a real, grown up adult dealing with geriatric parent issues. I handled it swimmingly. She’s out of the hospital now and, as swimmingly as I handled it, I hope that’s not a stream I have to swim up again any time soon.
I ran for 25 minutes straight for the first time. I started listening to Dianetics. I did those two things at the same time. Abject nonsense takes the mind off how awful running really is and gets you more quickly to the place, post-run, of how wonderful running really was.
I told Dr. Sexy that I was able to run for 25 minutes straight for the first time. He’s a runner. Body body body. He was happy for me, but when I told him I intended to run my blue off, he cautioned me that the mental health benefits of exercise cap at thirty minutes, so I don’t need to run a marathon in order to be a happy human. I told him not to worry. I was never going to be a compulsive exerciser. Body body body. I’m sure he believes it.
I started this 30 day writing challenge. I started this essay for day 2 for which the assignment is to write the worst thing you can think of. This essay didn’t turn out half bad, but it has no proper ending. I could justify that by saying summer isn’t technically over yet and I could yet do more stuff, but I’m not gonna. Not having a proper end isn’t the worst thing I can think of, but it’s a lovely clunk that fulfills the assignment, so clunk. There it is. The end.
Artificial blue to beat the blues
No sugar in your cookie, Cookie
Cutter approaches don’t often
Help problematic inflammation in the gray
Matter of fact exercise
Is another lever we can pull
Me closer Dr. Beautiful
Blues—nothing artificial about you-oo
Tell me again
How the mental health benefits of exercise
Cap at thirty minutes so I can’t
Lap sad to death in the beautiful chlorine blue.
M. N. Ashley 