Trashley: Twenty-Eight

The Guardrail

My relationship with Ashley was nosediving. She existed on the couch as if she’d run out of steam, unable to sustain life as the person she claimed to be. She told me she burned through books, but I’d never seen it. She said she was a nature lover, but she refused to go on walks or hikes with me and Perci. She claimed she was always scribbling math equations on whiteboards, which would be true if you replaced “scribbling math equations on a whiteboard” with “getting high and playing her PlayStation.”

It sucked.

It felt like a bait-and-switch.

In better times.

Ashley bought me a new laptop after turning her location off and disappearing for half the day. It was a pattern: whenever she took her location off after starting a fight out of nowhere, she’d always return with a gift. And not just a gay little gift like a box of chocolates and a teddy bear, but an expensive gift like an iPad or a laptop. She bought me things I didn’t need, but her love-bombs worked. It felt like that was her way of apologizing instead of saying sorry like a normal person.

But Ashley was anything but normal.

I set up the new MacBook Pro Ashley gave me, which she said was an early Christmas present. She held out a USB drive so I could transfer all of my files from my old computer before wiping it…