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Tag: Ashley

The Burden of Choice

I am sitting in a concrete classroom. A young professor with thick dark hair and sharply tailored pants stands before the chalkboard. She is smart and beautiful and terrifying. She is everything I hope to be someday, but I am just a bright-eyed freshman, barely eighteen, barely formed. And I am arguing my point. “Never. It should never be legal in any situation.” The room is quiet, and the professor stares at me, eyebrows slightly raised. I have dissented from the crowd, daring to regurgitate that which I’ve been trained to say, things that make sense within my small and simple world. Right now, that world is black and white. I have not yet traveled through the gray.

Ashley

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Moon Child

I believe in signs. I believe in Mother Earth and the Moon and God and Love and asking for what you need out loud. Someone is listening – I promise you – because last night, she answered me. It had been a day, a not so perfect day where I couldn’t shake the sadness and apathy that had taken hold. When these days come – curling my body around itself to protect my center, wrapping knees into chest, arms around knees, squeezing eyelids tight to shut out the world – I’m never quite sure what to do, how to right myself again. There was nothing I could point to and say, “Aha! That is the thing that has busted me up. That is the thing I must fix.” The thoughts just rolled in, covering me in gray fog as I fumbled through the hours until kids were tucked in beds and the responsibilities of the day were done. I had big things on my mind; it was time to shut them down and start over in the morning.

Ashley

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Under Wraps

In a house filled with penises, I am determined to keep my feminist spirit alive. This is not easy. It feels insurmountable some days, especially as my boys age and I find myself shielding my sons’ eyes from all that makes me female while they prance like tiny peacocks on display. These peacocks pee on everything: bathroom walls, linoleum floors, newly laundered beds, porch railings, trees, flowers. These little peacocks mark their territory with sticky urine. And it’s not just them. I let the dog out and watch him lift his leg and spray the earth. He comes back inside, then licks himself loudly, unapologetically.

Ashley

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Tell Me My Beauty

“Tell me my beauty!” she says, eager, hopeful as we all turn to face her. She has been waiting on this for a year. I know because I have, too. We all have. And so it begins, “You are classically beautiful, storybook beautiful, like Audrey Hepburn or Snow White with your dark hair and fair skin.” We rush to shower her with adoration. “And your freckles. I love your freckles!” “And your eyes. We know you have a thing with your eyes, but they are gorgeous.” “Seriously. The color. So gorgeous!” “And you have the best smile. Like you smile with your whole body. Completely infectious.” It’s a tradition we’ve started along the way, the first time in New Orleans in a dark bar where liquor loosens tongues and the space between strangers pulls you closer to the ones you came with.

Ashley

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Up in Michigan

It all started with Hemingway. Scratch that. It all started 17 years prior with a handful of lies and one night of no after no after no after no into tears into silence. It hadn’t started with Hemingway at all; he just broke it wide open. We left on a Saturday morning with a loose agenda and high hopes. My girlfriends and I stuffed ourselves and our strong feminist leanings into an SUV and headed north. It feels good to head north. We were Hemingway hunting. Michigan natives, we had the good fortune of easy access to the upper reaches of the Lower Peninsula where the rolling hills and pine forests bleed into the cool of a Great Lake, a place that gives space to dreams and fears and harsh realities, a Hemingway haunt.

Ashley

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Graceful Warrior

I am not graceful. I am nearly always the opposite. Clumsy, rushed, awkward, fumbling. It has been that way since I can remember, spending full nights into day-breaks pleading to reside inside the husk of someone else, begging for a body that knows how to move without being noticed. Or questioned. Or mocked. But here I stay, trapped inside this one, just slightly out of tune, enough to blend and enough to bleed, watching the others glide effortlessly by.

Ashley

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Who Is Watching The Children?

I drink whiskey because I like how it sounds, rolling out of my mouth and onto the bar. The burning sweet bite at the close of each swallow has grown on me over the years, and where I once had to brace the back of my tongue for the awaited burn, that same tongue now salivates when I near the well. This behavior is learned, imprinted. I’ve adapted to the thick warmth it brings. What I can’t accustom myself to, what I should not have to accustom myself to, is the side-eye glance, the blazing double standard that follows in its wake.

Ashley

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At Your Service

I am 20 years old. I am perched on a stool staring out across rolling greens, straining to see incoming dots on the horizon. Golf carts buzzing along the paved path toward my outpost for the day - a halfway house nestled in the hardwood forests and carpets of grass, lily pad ponds with the croak of frogs and heron calls. I am bored with flipping burgers and moving sausages from warming pot to grill face, freshening them up, bringing them back to life for the next customer. I hear the cart approach before I see it. Four golfers stroll up and peer through the open window. Men. Always men. I get down from my perch and stand there as they size me up. Eyes scan my body, tip of my head to tennis shoes. They move from shock of blonde, blue eyes and matching polo, khaki shorts mid-thigh. I shift my weight from left to right, smile, ask what I can get for them.

Ashley

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