Wreck

by Catherine Newman

Here’s what’s true about the Internet: very infrequently do people log on with their good news. Gosh, they don’t write, I had this weird rash on my forearm? And it turned out to be completely nothing!

Why had we all been taught the expression Accidents happen? The presumed inevitability paralyzed me with fear. Was I brave enough to love anybody? Maybe. Maybe not.

“Little prick,” she warns, which is what a whole bunch of men I know should have on their tombstones.

Have you ever taken an elderly parent to a juice bar? No? Don’t start now.

We’ve been together thirty-five years, and we’re still getting to know each other. We do not take this project lightly. I mean—sometimes we do? But not always.

His personality is very cross that bridge when you come to it. Mine is very apply to engineering school in case there’s a bridge that might need crossing but it hasn’t been designed yet.

I can be on my mental hands and knees, flailing around under the couch of my mind with a hockey stick, trying to sweep out a name I can’t remember—and all I’ll dredge up is a Ping-Pong ball, a catnip mouse, and a spool of thread. If I look away, though, sometimes it might creep out on its own little feet.

If a genie swelled up out of a lamp’s spout to grant him anything, I’m pretty sure Nick would pick an absence of conflict. If there were three wishes, he might pick an absence of conflict as the second one too, just to be absolutely certain.

Remember the world from back when you couldn’t even find out if you had strep throat without a doctor calling the wall phone in your kitchen? Now you just click into your computer and discover that you have cancer or that you have—I’m seeing this only now—a white-blood-cell disorder called leukopenia or that they’ve scheduled your autopsy.

“How did you actually meet?” “We met at Cracker Barrel.” “Really?” “Yes! We bumped right into each other at the . . . barrel? Getting our crackers? No. Mom. We met on Tinder. That’s how people meet.”

Grief is like the sound of the exhaust fan over the stove—a constant hum that recedes a little to the background over time, though you never get to turn it off.

I will be dead in my casket with the phone pressed to my cold ear, on hold about the copay for my vaginal estrogen.

It had started to seem so much less scientific to me than what I’d always imagined. Diagnosis was more like decorators holding up a paint swatch and eyeballing a match than like researchers squinting through a microscope and making objective determinations.

You can visit with the fear, but don’t hire a van and move there.”

I’m learning to detach my mind from fear. I stand at the water’s edge and I pull the plug on catastrophic chatter—You will die!—so that I can wade into the full, glorious crazy.