Day 80

Now I lay on the floor to ground myself.
I left my phone in the living room
so I wouldn’t be tempted to reread
the messages from a year ago,
wonder if the signs were there and I could be
15 months through the healing journey
instead of 9 weeks [12, actually].
I don’t want to think about our last kiss.
I want to call you and block you.
I wish I could cut the fat between my organs and underneath my skin.
I wish I was still in love with you and
could hear you laugh about the mistake
I made at work because that’s how you kept the anorexia in line.
The floor is supposed to ground me. I miss you more now.

*

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, Live Science, The Scientist, MedPage Today and KevinMD. She has been nominated for multiple awards, including Best Small Fiction and a finalist for the Claire Keyes Poetry Award and Subnivean Awards in Poetry, and is working on her first poetry collection.

More at NaaAshitey.com.

Twitter/Instagram: @foreverasheley
Bluesky: @foreverasheley.bsky.social