May
By: Na Asheley Ashitey
In my senior year of high school, my chemistry teacher referred to me as “the other one.” I started thinking about that moment today when I was in the middle of conditioning my hair.
I started thinking about those montages when women leave the bathroom after washing their hair and how their partners are all over them, praising their bodies and playing with their hair. The way that the women in movies whose hair in those scenes, are an extension of their vagina, full of slip and grip and lust and desire and biblical sin; I felt the tears threatening to spill over.
I looked in the mirror and started at myself. I knew why I was crying. It wasn’t because of the way I look when I wash my hair. I don’t really care that I don’t look like those women when I wash my hair. I started to cry because I remembered how inhuman I was to the world. Maybe my chemistry teacher’s racism was her giving me a kind warning: that no one actually sees me as a person and I’m so easily forgettable; and that I need to prepare myself for when I am given examples of my object-ness. I’m an “it”. No one should ever refer to me by my name. I’m a placeholder. It’s why everyone finds it so easy to leave me behind without warning. It’s why I find myself tortured across physical and digital mediums when my presence is erased without warning and with ease.
I would say “I must be so messed up as a person that everyone I love can leave me behind like it’s nothing” but according to my chemistry teacher, I’m not a person: I am not even a nobody. I am an “it”. I’ll start acting like “it” then. It’ll make everything hurt less.
I don’t know how to stop the dam from breaking.
Naa Asheley Afua Adowaa Ashitey (She/Her/Hers) is a writer and aspiring physician-scientist from Chicago, currently living in San Francisco. Her works have been published in Broken Antler Magazine, Euphony Journal, The /tƐmz/ Review, Sage Cigarettes Magazine and The Xylom. She will be starting her MD-PhD at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in Summer 2024. More at NaaAshitey.com
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