Never Let Go

Part Two, from Kelley Benham: Bent double, I shuffled down a winding corridor, trying to find my baby.

Somewhere in this place my new daughter lay alone in a neonatal intensive care unit, struggling to breathe. I could feel the stabbing incision where they had cut her out of me two days before. That's how it felt — like there had been an assault, perhaps in an alley with a dull spoon. The doctors had been kind and correct, and they'd had no choice. But they might as well have taken my liver, or my heart.

The curving pastel hallways felt infinite. I'd visited her — a raw and tiny thing, born four months premature — but could not remember how to get back there, and I wasn't supposed to go alone.

I clutched a syringe containing a trace amount of milk. Since her birth, I'd spent nearly every hour in a hospital bed attached to an electric pump, a frustrating and painful exercise that only magnified the absurdity of the situation. My body did not seem to know what to do. It was April 2011 and the baby wasn't due until August, yet here she was. Everything was out of synch.