We All Want Impossible Things

by Catherine Newman

“Aren’t you furious?” I’d pressed, and he shrugged. “I want you to be crazy about me,” I’d said, and he said, “You want that. I know. But you also want space to think and work. Freedom. You want to rest sometimes. You’d hate me if I tried to contain you.” He’d sighed, pressed his lips into a thin line. “I love you, but you want impossible things, Ash,” he said, finally, and it was true. It still is. I want impossible things.

Our dumb animal hearts.

We trudge on through the glorious slush, the fresh, metallic air. I’m having a memory of Belle as a toddler in these very woods, running out ahead of Honey and me with her dangly little stringed mittens, her little blue hat with its pompom, and then turning to run back, Honey bending down to scoop her up every time. “Thank goodness you’re back!” he said, over and over again. “We missed you!”

“You know bats?” she says. “Yeah.” “How a bat is like a tiny little mouse—like, the smallest, sweetest thing ever? Only then it spreads its wings and it’s suddenly huge and horror-movie scary?” “Yeah,” I say. “I feel like human dicks are like that.” “Wait,” I say. “What?”

Everyone dies, and yet it’s unendurable. There is so much love inside of us. How do we become worthy of it? And, then, where does it go?

Is it better to have loved and lost? Ask anyone in pain and they’ll tell you no. And yet. Here we are, hurling ourselves headlong into love like lemmings off a cliff into a churning sea of grief. We risk every last thing for our heart’s expansion, even when that expanded heart threatens to suffocate us and then burst.

“Life is messy. I certainly don’t expect tidiness from yours or anybody else’s.”