Sandwich

by Catherine Newman

“It’s so crushingly beautiful, being human,” the mother sighs, and the daughter rolls her eyes and says, “But also so terrible and ridiculous.”

This is how it is to love somebody. You tell them the truth. You lie a little. And sometimes you don’t say anything at all.

I’m just a person. That’s part of choice—we get to make our own decisions, even if they’re imperfect.

were put on this earth. To say to each other, I know how you feel. To say, Same.

What does loss look like, in your body? Where is it? It feels like an air bubble stuck in your psyche. It feels like peering down into a deep hole. The vertigo of that. The potential for obliteration. It’s in your stomach. Your spleen. Or it’s just your heart losing its mind.

Maybe grief is love imploding. Or maybe it’s love expanding. I don’t know. I just know you can’t create loss to preempt loss because it doesn’t work that way. So you might as well love as much as you can. And as recklessly. Like it’s your last resort, because it is.