The Push

by Ashley Audrain

The comfort I found in you was consuming—I had nothing when I met you, and so you effortlessly became my everything.

“Marriages can float apart. Sometimes we don’t notice how far we’ve gone until all of a sudden, the water meets the horizon and it feels like we’ll never make it back.” She paused and looked only at me. “Listen for each other’s heartbeat in the current. You’ll always find each other. And then you’ll always find the shore.”

Not the person shaped by thirty-five years. Just my body. I stood naked in front of the mirror after taking off my sweater, which was covered in the pureed peas Sam had spit up. My breasts wilted like the plant in our kitchen that I could never remember to water. My stomach spilled over the indent from my underwear like the foam on the edge of my lukewarm latte. My thighs were marshmallows punctured with a roasting stick. I was mush. But the only thing that mattered was that I could physically keep us all going. My body was our motor.

These are, though, the kinds of things that fester in a person’s mind until she no longer feels loved; they are the happenings that took us from a place we could have survived, even in the grave face of a death that nearly killed me, too, to the place we simply could not come back from. These things became too heavy and too hurtful, habitual abuses in what once felt like the safest place in the world.

There are people who work through it, who fight for one another, who do it for the children. The life they thought they needed. But I had nothing to fuel the fire. Nothing to give.

“You know, there’s a lot about ourselves that we can’t change—it’s just the way we’re born. But some parts of us are shaped by what we see. And how we’re treated by other people. How we’re made to feel.”