Ashley ✓

Fourty-Seven | Ashley

SOTC: Elastic Heart by Sia

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(Assuming that you know the song Bohemian Rhapsody)

And there it was: heaven.

My eyes fluttered open for the beacon of the pearly gates to shine into the hazel of them, an orchestra melodizing in my eardrums, the weightlessness in my hands and feet flowing with each chord. Angels breathed assurances in the deepest part of my audibility and their cherub lips kissed my cheeks softly right as J. Christ levitated me into—

"Are you freaking kidding me?" I said aloud as I fully opened them to the ugliest ceiling I'd ever seen. I mean, seriously, I'd never seen such stale wall tiles in my life— and I attended West High School. That's when I touched the bandage adorning my person, one surrounded by various IVs, to realize I was not a martyr to a chest wound signifying the eternal life of a literary legend. In actuality, I'd realized Summer Greenland had a shooting accuracy that made the would-be Trump assassinator look like Chris Kile. As in I wept over a bullet to the shoulder like a BITCH!

I sighed, falling into my upright bed again.

But even as I harnessed the conscious to realize what me being alive meant— as in I could smell the jail time or no viable future right around the time nurses would likely find me awake, it was then I found it most appropriate to commit my next action.

"Is this the real life?" I sang with what was definitely a vocal coached range. "Is this just fantasy? Caught in a landslide, no escape from reality. Open your eyes, look up to the skies and see. I'm just a poor boy, I need no sympathy! Because I'm easy come, easy go, little high, little low—"

"Any way the wind blows," a masculine voice followed, "it doesn't really matter to meeeee."

I inched my head to the side right as Mustafa chuckled the last 'ee', a chuckle ending in a breath right as he pinched the inner corners of bloodshot, chocolate eyes.

"Hey," I somehow found the mouth to say.

"Hey," he returned, just sniffing and chuckling again.

"How long have I been out for?" Did it make sense for this to be the first question to him? As in the guy who wouldn't look at me however long ago? No, but beggars can't be choosers in first instinctual thoughts.

"Two hours."

And the night gets more shameful, I thought as I observed the withering succulents on the windowsill behind the boy I could spectate no longer.

"Ashley, I—"

"Don't," I blurted.

"Ashley, look at me," he said.

I shook my head, looking at my bedsheets again.

"It's okay. I understand," Mustafa expressed with a feigned smile. "But—"

"I know you're here for the girl who saved your child," I blurted. "And since you are, I'll spell it out for you: you don't owe me anything. Not even a memory of my facial expressions right now, I swear to you. So if you want to walk out that door right now, I won't stop you. There's nothing I want more than you and your son to live your lives. Please."

"I'm not here for the girl who saved my son," he said. "I'm here for—"

"Ashley Walker," I squeaked, my vision of him blurred before me. "A girl you wouldn't even give a blade of grass to two hours ago?"

"I'm not here for Ashley Walker, either," he whispered.

"Then who?"

"You."

I blinked once. I blinked again. I blinked twice. I thought I'd blinked my eyeballs out until I asked, "What?"

"You. I'm here for you."

"Christ on a cracker, I'm probably on too many drugs for this," I groaned through my hands.

"It's easy to understand once I spell it out for you."

My hands left my face to rest on my bed, and I looked at him.

"At my darkest time, when I couldn't even stand my own flaws, I met you. You, who over the course of months helped me changed my life to such an incomprehensible better that you just had to be perfect. There was no other explanation. You just couldn't have any flaws in my mind because how could the girl if my dreams give me hope in the world if she did? And then I saw the girl on that Instagram, and that truth shattered before my eyes faster than a blink. I went from the boyfriend of the perfect girl to an agonized fool stalked by my school. I was plagued by thoughts that I should've known that I deserved nothing good. That you were a vessel for another episode in my own personal torture chamber, the torture chamber that I'd locked myself in for my son's entire life.

"And then it hit me as hard as a semi-truck."

"That analogy could not have come at a more ironic time," I said.

"With upmost politeness, stop interrupting my main character speech," he ordered. "This shit doesn't work if you don't let me cook."

"Sorry," I sighed, shame overcoming my body at my heinous action. "You may proceed."

"And then it hit me harder than... hell." He staged a glare at me when he said that last part specifically. But that's when he drew up a breath to proclaim:

"I didn't fall in love with the girl in that Instagram. I fell in love with the girl who recites the Declaration of Independence at the drop of a hat, belts Noah Cyrus like it's nobody's business, will go into back alleyways to snatch bags of RedDoor fries, rocks the title Professer Walker whenever she steps into my household, kisses me with two hands on my face, and does everything that makes her the real her, all with love for me and my baggage."

"Stop, why is this so corny?" I moaned through my hands.

As if I'd said nothing, he finished, "She's all that and the best parent to a child that absolutely adores her."

"Corny, corny, corny—" I kept saying.

"Girl, if you thought this was corny, I made a violent U-turn in my work's parking lot yesterday so I could re-barge into the Gardener household to declare it," he said. "Technically, I didn't really have it mapped out, but shit was gonna be something like, 'I love you, Ashley! Take me back please, Ashley!' Not even kidding, the last part we're gonna have their own lines, but then I was like—"

That's when I removed my hands from my face to reveal the blotched wet mess of it, my shoulders convulsing as I coughed out another round of sobs.

"If you make me cry, too, I swear to God—" he started, tears pricking his inner corners.

"I'm not crying!" I exclaimed when I put my hands back on my visage. "I'm just having a complex emotional and physiological response that involves my endocrine, ocular, muscular, and central and autonomic brain systems!"

"Do you wanna hear a line I just came up with?" he said. No, he'd choked it.

"What?" I moaned.

"You may not be a perfect girl, but you're my perfect girl."

I literally wailed.

When I did that, he'd taken my hands off my face to gently kiss my lips, which I kissed back. Not once, twice, but in an unfathomable amount of integers before I hugged the lottery of my existence, absorbing the highest high of my life with my lover. I did this as a girl residing in central L.A. with all the things I always needed inside me, specifically within the core of a child who'd always desired to be loved, and the things I always wanted right outside. Because I wasn't Ashley anymore.

I was me.