Free Open Heart by Marysol James

Eric’s had been the night before. And for some reason, this time she believed the warmth and the words. She believed it might be OK after all.
    **
    A long time later, Annabeth and Vicky were sitting on the sofa, glasses of wine in their hands. Annabeth talked, Vicky listened, nodding.
    “I thought I was at the end, Vicky. I really did. But… I guess I wasn’t.” She looked at Vicky. “Why – why did you never go through with it?”
    Vicky took a sip of wine. “At first? Because of Sonia. I just couldn’t leave her with her father.”
    “Was he abusing her too?”
    “Not then. Carl didn’t start hurting her until she was five, and that was actually when I started to seriously think about running. It was like… somehow, I could handle him hurting me, but if he laid a hand on her? We had to get out.” She was quiet for a second. “It’s so odd what we can get used to, isn’t it? How much pain we can learn to live with?”
    “Yeah.”
    “Carl first hit me when I was pregnant. He was so sorry… he cried for an hour after. I wanted to believe it would never happen again, and I couldn’t believe I’d be so stupid as to marry and have a baby with a monster… so I stayed. And of course it happened again and again and after a while, it became so normal. The pain and the fear and the aloneness. Totally normal.”
    “I know what you mean.”
    “After Sonia was born, I hung in there for her. Any time I seriously considered ending it all, I thought about her. But after a while, I realized that having Sonia as my only reason to not kill myself was a big mistake. I started to resent her for it. Can you believe it? I actually resented my own child.”
    “I don’t get it.”
    “It was like I was saying, ‘Well, if not for you, I’d be free to do what I really want!’ You know what I mean? It was like – like Sonia was preventing me from stopping the pain. From escaping.”
    Annabeth leaned back. “My God.”
    “I know. I know. But that’s where I got to… I was so, so trapped. I didn’t have a job or money, I was so isolated. I had a baby who needed me, and I couldn’t even take care of myself. It was a – a terrible, dark time in my life.”
    “So how did you get through it without taking your own life or going crazy?”
    “Small things. I mean, tiny fucking inconsequential nothing things.”
    “What do you mean?”
    “Like, TV shows. I started to watch TV shows with running threads in the storyline.”
    Annabeth shook her head, still confused.
    “Well,” Vicky said. “I’d want to know what happened next, right? I’d get close to the edge and then I’d say to myself, ‘But you have to watch that show tonight, to see if they finally kiss’, or ‘They’re so close to catching the killer… you can’t die until you see how they get him.’ Things like that.”
    “Wow.”
    “I know. It sounds ridiculous. But I just started finding small things to look forward to. Dumb, meaningless things, but still. They kept me holding on.”
    Annabeth shook her head. “That’s so…so…”
    “Bleak,” Vicky said. “Desperate. Sad. But that’s what I had, and so that’s what I held on to. Small things were manageable in a way that huge things just weren’t. I mean, what’s so overwhelming about a TV show?”
    “Yeah. I get it.”
    “I did that for a long time, and then Sonia got older and I had new things to look forward to. School plays, a ballet recital. Her birthday, Christmas. And soon, I didn’t even have to hang on for small things. Suddenly, I had big things. I had things for Sonia.” She smiled. “And that’s when I left.”
    Annabeth was quiet, running her finger around the rim of her wine glass. “I think – I think I did the same thing tonight. I think that’s what changed my mind.”
    “Small things?”
    “Yeah. I didn’t miraculously find one big reason not to kill myself… there was no lightning-bolt-from-the-blue moment. It was more like… like I kind of wanted to see