Memory
Ashley Elizabeth Evans
My children ask about my childhood all of the time. By my children, I mean my students. By my childhood, I mean years I cannot remember. They think I am old until it gets to graduation time, when I reveal my age, and they squeal. I am never as old as they think I am even though I talk like their mother, like their grandmothers, calling them “baby” and joking with them every which way, threatening a switch or snitching to them on their mommas. But my brain is younger. For too many years, my working memory started at age fourteen.
Now, the other years are slowly finding me again. They come back with certain smells and tastes and looks in the sky. People in the city ask me how I know it’s going to storm when I grumble about driving home in a downpour during a staff meeting that could have been an email. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to point to the sky or smell the change of the earth—even cemented cities have that waiting smell that wafts to your nostrils from the patches of grass on the sidewalk. Manufactured or not, that plant knows about rain and is waiting for it like I am.
I guess that is like me, too. I am waiting for something to arrive, but I am not sure what.
Maybe I am waiting for some type of apology. Too many people have done my body so wrong, including myself. Men, women, neither. But I won’t hold my breath waiting. I know it will never come. For some people, it can never come. Some people are too dead. Others are too proud. And my mother? Too oblivious.
She, too, asks me if I remember this or that thing we did supposedly together when I was a kid, and all I can do is sigh because I don’t remember what we did, but I do remember why I don’t remember. Living this half-true life is a cursed life. I wonder if I told her how I felt or if I told her what had happened, would it change anything then? Or now? But it doesn’t matter. Her heart is finally working as close to normal as it has ever been. Why halt her progress? She can’t take her cancer back, not being the mom I needed, not coming to tennis matches, or giving away my dog. She can’t hop in a time machine and stop anything from happening. She doesn’t tell off men who pretend to be my father, even when it is clear that I am uncomfortable, she is uncomfortable, or he is too smug and entitled, so what is the point? When I say things, she doesn’t listen. It is too much like shouting into the void. I can be plain as day, and she still doesn’t hear me.
Her apologies are like waiting for the rain.
Ashley Elizabeth Evans (she/her) is a Pushcart-nominated writer and teacher whose work has appeared in SWWIM, Voicemail Poems, Rigorous, and Sage Cigarettes, among others. Ashley’s debut full-length collection, A Family Thing, is forthcoming from Redacted Books/ELJ Editions (August 2024). She is also the author of the chapbooks you were supposed to be a friend (Nightingale & Sparrow, 2020) and black has every right to be angry (Alternating Current, 2023). As cofounder of the Estuary Collective, Ashley strives to provide free to low-cost programming for femme-identifying BIPOC. When Ashley isn’t teaching or working as the Chapbook Editor with Sundress Publications, she habitually posts on Twitter and Instagram (@ae_thepoet). She lives in Baltimore, MD with her partner and their cats. Ashley is Black before she is anything else.