Friday Feature: Ashley M. Coleman

Ashley M. Coleman is an author and music industry executive whose work sits at the

intersection of literature, culture, and community. Her debut novel Good Morning, Love

(Simon & Schuster, 2022) was featured by Joy the Baker and Katie Couric Media and

named one of Bustle's Most Anticipated Books of June 2022. Coleman is a fellow of Torch Literary Arts (2023) and Kimbilio (2025), and the founder of Permission to Write, the writing community she established in 2017 to create space to support Black writers. Philly born, LA based, she brings a decade of experience working alongside artists from marginalized communities and a nuanced, insider understanding of stories about creativity, identity, and what it costs to be heard.

What Was Never Named

It gets harder every day to tell the difference between being asleep and being awake. The urgency of the hospital staff changes when it’s understood that you’re not making it out alive. Or so they think, because the next time the doctor is in, you’re telling him you are going home to die.

They let their guards down when they think you can’t hear them. This one is sleeping with that one. Another one might fail an important exam. But over the beeps of the machines and the constant traffic in the hallway, your thoughts are interrupted by a presumptuous statement. 

“She has no family.” It’s matter-of-fact as one of them looks over your chart. As if family only means one thing. There have been people who loved you, though most are gone. You had a real community around you once. A lover or two, though most pale in comparison to your first. You’ve seen the world, written some notable words, and yet, here in a sterile hospital room, you’ve been reduced to the children you never carried in your womb, the parents who are dead, the siblings that never existed. But then you hear a voice. 

“She does have family. I’m Lily.” 

You only realize you’re asleep when you can’t respond. You simply drift back into the in-between plane. 

Lily waits quietly as you sleep. You can’t see her, but you feel her presence. It’s calming. A world away from the nurses who show up to stick or poke or prod. Eventually, she begins humming a soft tune. One you recognize. One that her mother always used to sing to her when she was a baby. One that had sweetly covered your skin before this moment. 

*

You met her mother, Bella, during your freshman year of college. You were completely lost trying to decode the massive map in front of you. “You are here,” but where exactly was here? You were close to calling it quits when she stopped mid-conversation with someone to ask you if you needed help. You were lost, and she was a sophomore; you’d learn. Just like you’d learn the lyrics to the song she always hummed and the way her brows knitted when she was determined, and memorized the way her soft curls cradled the nape of her neck. 

You told her you were a writer, though you barely had the right to call yourself that. She was majoring in poly sci with an art minor. 

You both had dreams of what it meant to change the world through organizing and art. All the ambition and blind rage at a broken system that was cultivated on most college campuses. Young, wild, and free. So, the first time she kissed you, you barely skipped a beat. It dissipated in the effervescence of the champagne that made you feel more mature than you were. You had too much to drink with the excitement of having her first piece placed in a gallery downtown, or maybe it was when she’d made her first sale. Either way, the excuse littered the space between you on the couch the next morning. As if it never happened. As if the kiss hadn’t stained your lips. As if anything would ever be the same. 

Whatever was between you and Bella was never named. You were friends. Who made a home within each other. Who held each other when life threw you haymakers. Who couldn’t help but make wagers on senseless competitions, holding your breath or running the fastest. You were friends who certainly couldn’t put language to the synchronization of your heartbeats. 

After graduation, when you both made your way to D.C., you were still inseparable. Deeply rooted. So, you never imagined seventeen years would have passed between speaking, holding each other’s hand, or engaging in late-night debates at the kitchen table. 

*

My dearest, 

… you validate my existence in a way I cannot explain. You see me when I’m feeling most invisible, and push me when you can envision the finish line, and I’m stuck at the starting blocks … 

*

You wonder if you sound like yourself today. In your mind, you’re still the same able-bodied person, but the way people’s eyes shift when they see you registers that you must be in bad shape. Lily’s eyes are steadfast.

She is still, with knitting needles in her hands, yarn wrapped neatly around her fingers. When she notices you are awake, she stuffs her project in the corner of the chair before leaning forward, “You know who I am?” 

“Lily, I’m not dead yet. You look exactly like your mother.” 

*

In D.C., Bella started her political networking at an entry-level gig for a congresswoman. You followed her there because you could write anywhere and nothing was waiting for you back home. You shared a one-bedroom apartment, a sublet in Foggy Bottom from a woman who had more money than God and let you rent her space for ridiculously cheap because it was held up in litigation during her divorce and she was a “feminist.” She told you this as she tried to decode the relationship between the two women standing in front of her. Your understanding was just as scrambled.

The apartment was fully furnished, the walls adorned with trappings from her travels, but the two of you were simply happy to have a roof over your heads, trudging through the ominous fray of post-grad life. But D.C. was a wonderful place to be figuring it out, with a buzzing nightlife, amazing food, and other young professionals trying to make some sense of the world. 

Your place was small, but that didn’t stop you from hosting salons and game nights, and random after-hours gatherings after a night out on the town. You were poor, but life was rich. 

The next time Bella kissed you was in that apartment, and there was no champagne. You were tinkering at a newsletter you’d been hired to write that was soulless but paid well. It was a particularly trying day for her on the Hill, and she’d barely painted in months. You made dinner, and she cried over Hamburger Helper and canned biscuits, or maybe it was your pasta with vodka sauce, but it was the notion, the thought. “That you were always looking out for her,” she said to you from across the kitchen island. 

At that point you realized that you were always more attracted to aura than anatomy. The bright orange light that radiated from Bella threatened to consume you from the moment you heard her voice. But there was the cement wall between the two of you. Black. Churched. Woman. It felt impossible to climb. Already three strikes against you, so you tucked away the queer. You told her the two of you couldn’t keep doing this; it was confusing you.

Then someone else began auditioning for the role of looking out for Bella. Someone who could check the boxes that would make a life much more palatable than one with you. Marcel was a law student at American. A mutual friend brought him over for one of your meetings of the minds, and he and Bella hit it off. He was a kind man who shared your love for activism, who was studying to become a civil rights attorney with dreams of opening an affordable legal clinic. You weren’t jealous of Bella and Marcel, but you were careful. 

A willing third wheel, you were able to keep close watch. Was he genuine? Was she? Were you? He’d developed an interest in your writing, reading the journals that your work was published in. Even encouraging you to think bigger, to start working on your first novel. You wouldn’t say you were waiting for her; you maintained a life outside of them, but you were present. 

As things progressed, the uncertainty of your heart settled. She slept out more nights at his place. You hid your disappointment when she had to choose between your reading and his fancy dinner with a law firm he was courting. She asked you to be her maid of honor. And when a precious flower came along, a baby girl, you thought that there was nothing you would do to jeopardize being in their lives, and so you even let her convince you to take the job offer at American that Marcel arranged. He spoke so highly of you because anyone that Bella loved, he did too. 

And so, you loved them. Trips to the playground. Overnights with Lily while they had date night. Vacations where you tagged along. Proms and graduations, you played the role. You entertained someone of your own. A poet. He took you to London for the first time, where you fell in love with travel. You traversed Europe and wrote postcards and mailed them from foreign cities as you pieced together your first manuscript. 

But the last time Bella kissed you, you gave yourself permission to kiss her back, and you ended up making love in a hotel a few miles from Lily’s school. You’d dropped her off for her freshman year of college at Penn in Philadelphia and were much too tired to drive back. With snacks spread all around on the floor, you caught Love & Basketball on HBO, only for a debate to ensue about whether it was a romantic movie. To you, it was insufferable, but Bella was glued to the screen, her eyes hopeful, her posture swooning.

“It’s not always easy to admit how much you love someone,” she said. “Especially not after you’ve started a path for your life.” 

“It should be that simple,” you replied mindlessly as the character Monica begged her childhood friend to play her for his heart. 

When you turned to look at her, the earth seemed to be rotating off its axis with the slight turn of her lips and the way she inched closer to you. She told you that she loved you much more deeply than she’d ever wanted to admit to herself. She caressed the side of your face and pulled you into her. You melted into her embrace as if it was the only place you’d ever felt safe. As if you both had finally come home.

*

My Dearest,

… I’ve always admired how you never gave up on your art. Somehow it all got so muddy when the politics took over my creativity. I’m painting again now, and I realized they’re all some version of you … 

*

When you arrived at her house the next day, Marcel was waiting, his arms crossed; he was back early from the work trip that prevented him from accompanying Bella to drop their daughter off at college. 

“This,” he snarled, spraying a bit of spit when he said it. “Is over.” He had a box in his hands. Your box with its pinstripes and floral stickers. The box she’d kept all your mementos in from over the years. One that held the letters you had written to her, the dried flowers from her first gallery exhibition, your first literary award.

Naively, you assumed it would be the moment she would run away with you. From the veneer of a life she’d manufactured that was molding beneath the surface. Instead, without a word, when her hand slipped out of yours like sand, you knew the castles you’d built overnight were being washed away. 

They turned and left you standing in the middle of the yard, surrounded by the brown leaves that had been discarded by the trees. But he still had the box in his hands. You walked over to the doorstep to retrieve it as their voices violently breached the windows, but decided to turn back to your truck. The words you could decipher were heartbroken, betrayed, crushed. The most you’d had in common with Marcel over the years. Three months later, she was outside your window. 

For a while, after that day, you used to think you were still connected. Like all you had to do was think enough about her and something would happen. You would see that she viewed one of your blogs or she liked a social media post. One night, she showed up. You watched her from behind your window curtain. She stayed there for a while, through the unanswered doorbell, the missed calls and texts, and even for a minute longer as light rain formed from the clouds. Tap, tap, tapping on the pane. And because you hoped this was the moment you would both allow the true contents of your heart to spill between you, you let her up. 

She loved you, but she couldn’t leave Marcel. Too much was in motion. They were right there with the clinic starting, and her chief of staff position was about to be within her reach. And she looked different to you then. And the song she hummed sounded like noise. And you promised yourself that night that you wouldn’t think about her so hard again when you clicked submit on a tenure track position at Tulane. 

*

My dearest, 

… Marcel told me that you resigned, but where will you go? And how will my heart keep beating in rhythm if you’re gone?

*

“Why couldn’t my dad see how much she loved you?” 

“Oh, Lily, I fear the problem is, he did.” 

A sharp pain tears through your left shoulder, radiating and spreading like a tree branch through your skull. Your face must be contorted as Lily springs up from her seat and holds your hand. It had been too long since you’d been touched with gentleness. She uses her free hand to ring the chord for the nurse. 

“You were always there, then you weren’t. This staple in my life growing up. You were mom’s best friend.” Lily tries to make sense of it. 

When the nurse arrives, Lily excuses herself to grab a cup of coffee before you can warn her that it’s nothing but mud. Though your taste buds had been changing, you knew good coffee from the months you spent in residence in Paris. 

The nurse wears a goofy expression as she pumps your veins with what you dub liquid crack. It is fast-acting, and your limbs go slack. The cold rush is icy in your bloodstream, and when you wake up again, Lily is there, successfully progressing on what looks like a knitted top. 

You can’t help but wonder why she’s here. Save for a glimpse of a mutual friend’s post, it was much too painful for you to attempt to keep up with their lives. But because the world is small, you know Lily married an architect, and they live in Silver Springs with their two children. 

“I found the letters.” Lily finally offers. “The ones you always sent to her and the ones she kept writing long after you were gone.” As if the connection you and Bella had was passed down to her. The ability to read your thoughts. 

Bella is dead. Lily holds her composure the best she can, but there is a tremble in her bottom lip that she bites until it is white after she tells you. 

“Your mother was always competing with me. Couldn’t even let me die first.” A tear manages its way down your face, detouring in the deep wrinkles that settled in and made their home on the planes of a once buoyant canvas. 

You hate that you allowed this space and time between you. That she would have suffered without you being able to hold her hand or rub her hair, just like you did when she brought Lily into this world. 

“There was a dedication in your book that led me to them.” She digs into her tote bag and pulls out Far from Home. While it wasn’t the commercial success of your debut, it was acclaimed in smaller literary circles. “A daunting tale of longing,” you remember from a review, maybe Kirkus or some other. 

“A name perfectly ascribed to a beautiful and rebellious woman and the loveliest flower I’ve ever known.” Lily’s eyes are veiled with silver, the slight film before the tears form. “Bella and Lily?” 

You can’t manage more than silent agreement.

“It had lilies all over it. I don’t know; I just remembered how sacred that box was to her. How much she cherished it. How much she hid it from my dad.” 

*

Over the next few days that feel like weeks, Lily keeps showing up. She reads the letters to you that all start “My dearest.” They are everything Bella said after the day your world bent into something unrecognizable with Marcel standing at the door. It is every letter you could never answer when you thought she’d moved on from you and you tried your best to love others: a visual artist, a dancer, a musician. 

You and Lily review your estate planning, and she is surprised to see that she’d already been the benefactor. You meet her family who are all staying in a hotel close to the hospital. Her children are gorgeous and well-mannered. Her youngest has Bella’s zeal, her confidence.

You share with her a letter of your own that you were too much of a coward to send. It starts, “I’ve only kept writing to find my way back to you through these pages.” 

And on your last day on this side of the plane, you can feel Lily’s soft breath as she holds you close. It gets hard to tell the difference between her face and Bella’s. All that time you thought she’d let go, all that time she’d been holding on. You know someone is holding you, and someone is humming, and the chatter is muffled, and the beeps are slowing, slowing. 

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