We All Want Impossible Things

by Catherine Newman

I picture her mind like a bar, her thoughts and memories nursing their last round. It’s closing time, and you don’t have to go home, but you can’t stay here.

I assume it’s not a coincidence that the closer people get to death, the more you see the extent to which we’re all just skeletons in elaborate, fleshy waiting rooms.

At the risk of sounding like a diamond commercial, we share a lifetime of memories, Edi and I. We went to preschool together and then elementary school. I wore green corduroy knickers and a Gunne Sax blouse to her bat mitzvah. We trick-or-treated together, were flashed together in Central Park by a man in an actual trench coat, made ribbon-braided barrettes together. We attended different high schools, but we went to REM concerts together, to David Bowie concerts. We ate mocha-chip Frusen Glädjé. We drank Tab and Fresca and diet Slice, spritzed each other with Anais Anais. We kept toothbrushes at each other’s houses, showed each other our hickeys and hurt feelings, our SAT scores and pregnancy tests. She ended up at Columbia and I ended up here for college, but we went abroad to Italy the same semester of junior year, swallowed our own body weight in gnocchi, and stayed overnight at a brothel in Naples, which we had mistaken for a youth hostel. We presided over each other’s weddings, hosted each other’s baby showers. We held each other’s newborns, and then, during her treatment and my separation, each other’s hands and hearts.

Edi’s memory is like the backup hard drive for mine, and I have that same crashing, crushing feeling you have when the beach ball on your computer starts spinning.

If there’s a metaphor for our friendship, it might be this. The blind faith. The absolute dependability. The love like a compass, its north always true.

“Some sounds are only fun to make.” I still think that in my head sometimes, like when somebody is talking too much in a meeting. I always worry I’m going to say it out loud.

Now she wants to work a little bit on the letter she’s leaving for Dash, which is a combination of memories from his childhood and advice for his future self. I sit up in bed next to her, transcribe while she talks. She says a mix of normal things and crazy things: He should always splurge on Valrhona chocolate for baking, even though it costs a fortune (Okay!); he’s going to feel like he’ll never get over his first heartbreak, but he will, she promises him, he will feel better and better until there’s just a tiny invisible scar where his heart healed (So true!); if he ever feels strange and isn’t sure why, he should try eating a snack with a lot of protein in it, like cottage cheese or low-sodium beef jerky (Solid.); Bon Ami works as well as the toxic bathroom cleaning stuff and it’s just made of . . . chicken bones, she thinks, or maybe eggshells? (Sounds good.); he should play tennis—he should be sure to learn tennis and play it a lot and get really really good at tennis. I stop typing. “Hey, Eds,” I say. “This one seems a little stressful to me. Nobody in your family actually plays tennis.” I picture Dash with a little Björn Borg sweatband around his head, sobbing over a missed forehand. It was my mother’s dying wish!

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? A worldwide crescendo of grief, sustained day after day, and only one tiny note of it is mine.

Every year, ever since the girls were born, I have blown out the candles on my birthday cake and wished for just this. Everything I have already. No loss. I can’t spare anybody is what I always think. But, then, people must be spared. That is the whole premise of this life, of this time we have with each other.

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.

I stash thoughts and experiences in my mental Edi file to talk to her about later, and then realize that they’ll stay there forever. This is more confusing to me than it should be.