Trashley: Twenty-Seven
More Than Ramen
My trip to Joshua Tree started with Ashley locking me out of her car and ended with me being open to having kids since Ashley’s were so cute. I thought I knew myself and was shocked by my change of heart.
I’ve never wanted kids, and my lifestyle is not childproof. I have a white couch and a really cool knife collection, and it would be easy to mistake a bottle of water in my fridge for a THC-infused sparkling soda. Kids are loud and messy, and there’s nothing worse than the sound of a kid crying except the sound of a kid laughing. When I got back to Los Angeles, I had therapy and filled my therapist in on my latest life update.
“And what will happen if you have a baby?” my therapist asked. “Do you think Ashley will help raise it?”
“Yeah, that’s the plan. Ashley would live here and then go back to Minnesota for a week every month to see her other kids.”
“Lauren, having a baby will connect you to Ashley forever. Are you worried about that? You’ve seen what type of parent she is. She left her pregnant wife and toddler—”
“Well, Ashley said her wife got pregnant without telling her.”
“Right, but we also know Ashley is a liar—
“Well, I only suspect she’s a liar, I still need solid proof.”
“She lied about having a family.”
“Well it was a lie by omission, is that even a real lie?”
“Let me ask you something: if Ashley were a man, would you still want to raise a baby with her?”
“God, no! If Ashley were a man I would’ve ended things a long time ago, like when I found out she hid Cecelia from me.”
“So why is it different? Why is it okay for Ashley to lie about having a wife and kids, but not a man?”
I hadn’t thought about it like that before.
If Ashley were a man, I would’ve punched her in the nuts and never given her the time of day. We wouldn’t have lasted a month. No, week. I’d be like, why are you ghosting me on weekends, and why are you demanding so much of my time and attention, and how come your stuff is spread all over the country, and also no thank you to your temper. And where is your mother-fucking dog?
“Well, Ashley told me her ex is abusive, and I don’t know, she made herself seem like a victim, and you know I have a soft spot for that. She slid into my Achilles heel.”
“I would suggest putting more thought into raising children with Ashley. And examine why it’s okay for Ashley to act this way but not a man. I mean really think about it, Lauren. I’d suggest writing about it, too.”
I left therapy knowing I had some soul-searching to do. Of course, I always considered myself a feminist, and destroying the patriarchy is at the top of my to-do list every morning, right after Wordle and writing in my journal. Was Ashley a toxic man? The kind of person I despise more than anyone else on planet Earth? Wild if true. Plus, being a feminist means I’m fighting for equality for all genders, so allowing Ashley to get away with her behavior meant I’d have to allow a man to get away with it too, in a battle over who could be equally the worst. And that didn’t make no goddamn sense.
I went for a sad girl walk after therapy.
I stared longingly up at the sky and asked the Universe for guidance. Just please give me some answers, show me the light, or drop a piano on my head. I kicked pebbles down the sidewalk while I played Hurt by Johnny Cash in my head, but the Trent Reznor version. I was in my emo phase. I needed to know if tying myself to Ashley forever was incredibly stupid or just normal stupid.
If she paid for IVF treatments, I would have a free baby, but I also never even wanted a free baby.
When Ashley returned from Minnesota, we went back to our LA routine. She woke up early to get on Zoom calls for work at the head-hunting place, and I got up early to journal before starting my work on Ex On the Beach. I witnessed her calls, and how she spoke to her co-workers was crass and unprofessional for a corporate job. But it would’ve been a pleasantry for mine. I couldn’t believe she was an executive. But at least she was employed and seemingly paid well.
Since we both worked from home, we were around each other a lot. I typically wrote at my kitchen table for a few hours while Ashley took the living room. I took a break every day at noon to Peloton and shower. And since Ashley’s office was in a different time zone, she would wrap up work around the same time and get to her wellness routine, which included getting high as fuck, passing out on my couch, and waking up a few hours later to play video games. I’d remind her to Facetime her kids, which she was supposed to do every single afternoon at four thirty as part of her parenting plan, and there were so many times she simply wouldn’t call them because she was way too high and fucked up beyond oblivion.
Why did she even want kids if she just ignored them? Deadbeat dad.
Ashley seemed too comfortable as if the version of herself she sold me was just a trial run that ended after the first thirty days, with no option to upgrade. She got to a point where she rarely changed out of her pajamas. I’m all for being comfy, especially coming out of the Pandemic, but wearing pajamas for twenty-four hours in your mid-thirties is only allowable on Christmas Day and New Year's Day, as far as I’m concerned. I would even accept switching from a pair of day sweats into a pair of night sweats.
I walked Perci in my neighborhood every night around six thirty, as soon as the temperature cooled. I lived down the hill from Olivia Wilde, and she was dating Harry Styles, the only man on the planet who could ever get it from me. Oh, I was dying for a Harry sighting.
“I’m gonna walk Perci on the big loop,” I told Ashley, “If you feel like joining me.”
“I don’t want to,” she said, without taking her eyes off the video game she was playing on the massive TV she bought.
“Okay, but if I run into Harry, you’re gonna regret it.”
“I’m playing NBA 2K22, I’m busy.”
She never wanted to join me on these beautiful nightly walks through the hills. She didn’t ever want to be outside. I remember when she put up black-out curtains in my living room while I was in Spain. She thrived in the darkness. And I thrived in the light. She also started burning through edibles as if they were candy.
“I think the weed company you order from is stiffing us,” I said one night when I opened a new tin of edibles to find half of them missing.
“What do you mean?”
“Well, you just ordered these, and there’s supposed to be ten gummies, but half are gone. I don’t understand how this keeps happening.”
“Email them and demand a refund,” Ashley said.
The weed delivery app was short-changing us every single time. I went to their Yelp page to read the comments and see if anyone else had the same experience. Nope. Nothing.
Was Ashley sneaking gummies behind my back? No, I’d be able to tell. We’re around each other all the time, and I would have noticed.
One afternoon, Ashley’s weed delivery showed up at my apartment. She excitedly took every tin, can, and package out of the delivery bag like a five-year-old who had gotten a set of Legos for his birthday. Ashley held out an edible package shaped like a piece of pie.
“Today is the day I take one hundred milligrams and see what happens,” she announced to me and Perci.
“You’re going to take that entire thing?” I asked, “Are you sure that’s a good idea?”
“It’s just a gummy. Stop acting like this is dangerous.”
While Ashley unwrapped the package, I glanced at the clock. It was twelve-fifteen in the afternoon. A red gummy flopped around in her hand, and she held it up to the light as if she had just discovered an immunity idol on Survivor. She slurped the entire gummy into her mouth and swallowed it in one piece. I watched it pass down through her throat like a mouse in a snake’s esophagus. She sat on my couch and started playing Grand Theft Auto.
“Bye-bye, have a beautiful time,” I said, knowing the edibles would knock her out cold, rendering her useless.
Thirty minutes later, she was passed out and drooling with the controller dangling from her wrist. I draped a blanket over her. Not because I wanted to keep her warm but because I didn’t want to see her lifeless body wasting not just the afternoon but her life away. Where was her drive? She used to brag about saving humanity with her Physics work.
She wasn’t even pretending to be a Physicist anymore. I wasn’t attracted to this Ashley. I felt like I was dating a teenage boy, and that would land me in jail. The Ashley I once knew was a distant memory. This Ashley was searching for the sweet spot between being knocked unconscious and in a coma.
Real life couldn’t have been that bad. She lived with a funny and chill girlfriend who didn’t question her or charge her rent. Her family lived less than two hours away. She had a good job and made a lot of money. She drove a fancy car. And she had cute kids she barely saw. Yet she still felt the need to escape. I started to feel bad for her. Like I should stage an intervention.
Eight hours after Ashley launched herself into outer space on her one-hundred-milligram gummy, she woke up on my couch groggy but as if nothing had happened.
“How was it?” I asked, “Did you glide down the astral plane and connect with your higher self?”
“It was everything. It felt like I was back in the womb.”
Ashley DoorDashed some Din Tai Fung and went to bed early. She was tired from her nap.
The next morning, I opened my front door and found two large, heavy boxes on my balcony addressed to Ashley.
“What is this?” I asked.
“Oh… those are T-shirts for my new company.”
“What do you mean your new company?” she had never mentioned this before.
“My friend and I started a marketing company called More Than Ramen.”
Ashley and I slid the boxes into the living room. Ashley opened the first box, and sure enough, it was filled with no less than fifty gray T-shirts that said, More Than Ramen. She opened the second box, it was filled with grey sweaters that said the same thing.
“What does More Than Ramen mean?” I asked.
“Well, we came up with the name because, in college, we couldn’t afford to eat anything that cost more than ramen.”
“Okay, so what’s your plan with the shirts? You have enough in here to fill a department store.”
“I’m gonna send them to our clients,” she said. She pulled a few shirts out for us, even though I’d never wear one in public, and we stacked the boxes in my bedroom closet.
It was weird she had never mentioned starting a company before. And I‘d yet to meet any of her alleged friends. I tried to find the company online but only came up, other than a notification they posted on UpWork, looking for a graphic designer. I respect a good side hustle, but I couldn’t understand why she wouldn’t tell me one hundred shirts would be delivered.
“I’m gonna get my car detailed,” she said. “I’ll be back later.”
Ashley got her car fully detailed in Burbank every single week. It wasn’t dirty to begin with, but that was her thing. I didn’t mind. It got her out of the house and out of pajamas.
Twenty minutes passed, and I texted her asking if she could swing by Trader Joe’s on the way home because we were getting low on coffee. That’s when I saw she turned off her location. That’s strange, I thought. I opened the Tesla app to see where she was, but again, she had removed me as a driver. I called her, and her phone went directly to voicemail. What the fuck was she doing?
Five hours later, Ashley showed up at the apartment with a bag from Best Buy.
“Why did you take your location off?” I demanded.
“What’re you talking about? I didn’t,” she said.
“Yes, you fucking did, you stopped sharing your location, and you took me off the Tesla app again. What are you up to? I’m so sick of this. It feels like you’re always lying to me.”
“Okay, if you really want to know, I was at Best Buy getting you an anniversary present. Here, are you happy now?” She flung the Best Buy bag in my face.
“What is this?”
“I got you a new computer. Wow, you’re welcome.”
“Ashley, I don’t need a new computer. Mine works perfectly. You have to stop buying me things I don’t need.”
“You said your older sister wanted a new computer for your nephew, so I thought you could send her your old computer if I bought you a new one.”
“I guess, but this is too much.”
“Well, I’m not returning it. I also bought this USB card reader so that I can help you transfer all of your files from your old computer to your new one so that you don’t lose anything.”
I thought for a second. I guess that made sense, even though my “old” computer was barely a year old. But I’d happily send it to my nephew if my files were transferred to the new computer Ashley got me. My computer had everything—my entire life—in it: photos, videos, notes, texts, contacts, scripts, essays, docs, book proposals, search history, and calendars.
Ashley held the USB card up, “I just need to transfer your files onto this card first.”
I can't see past the GIANT RED FLAG 🚩 PLEASE don't give her your computer. Run. Don't go in the house.
Really thought Harry was going to intervene for a sec 😆