Pelvic Floor Diary Entry #2
Yesterday, I learned the answer as to why I have a notable frustration [hate/resentment] that my mother praises God so much. Not because the concept or the existence of religion is wrong; that the idea of living a life to a moral code is so sacrilegious and foreign. I still know better than that. But because every time she tells me to put my struggles and give it to God, I only have the energy to ask him why. Because it is day 97, and what makes me womanly according to both scripture and biology, approximately, has vanished into a glass closet. And yet I can’t even say I despise him. Because despite his all-knowing nature, I doubt that God, who created the holders of uterus to birth his children, could’ve foreseen his children would unleash the curse that is capitalism, and by all accounts, make us have to scourge this scorched earth for a cure to this cursed womb; to hope that a dry heaving spell will come upon me; and the dampness that stains my grey panties will be crimson and not just a greater gray hue.
Heaven is somewhere along the way
If I am to die by your hands, or more likely by your knees or a gun, I will not waste my final breaths to beg for mercy. With a contentment that makes God pause mid-sermon, I will choreograph my body and ensure my excretions, blood or saliva, are embedded into the soles on your shoes. You will carry me across the soil, the pavement, and the tile. That with each wash, even as the water runs lighter in hue, a trace of red will remain beneath it, clinging to the basin. You may scrub and rinse, until your hands ache and the water cools. Only after fifteen minutes will the porcelain tub will no longer be stained. But in the lowest of lights, the red beneath your nails will settle into your fingerprints. And as you run to turn off the light, it will not be darkness that follows you. The scent of my blood will always lie along your periphery.
Naa Asheley Ashitey is a Chicago-born writer and MD–PhD candidate at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. A first-generation, low-income Ghanaian-American and University of Chicago alumna, she writes at the intersection of race, medicine, and belonging. Her creative and editorial writing examines how policy, media, and academia reproduce structural violence—and what it means to resist with truth. Her creative work appears or is forthcoming in The Cincinnati Review, Hobart, Brittle Paper, Heavy Feather Review, BULL, and editorials for The Xylom, MedPage Today, and KevinMD. She has been nominated for multiple awards, including Best Small Fictions and a finalist for the Claire Keyes Poetry Award. More at NaaAshitey.com. Twitter/Instagram: @foreverasheley, Bluesky: @foreverasheley.bsky.social.
Image: Peter Herrmann, unsplash.com
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