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“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.
Why do we even do this—love anybody? Our dumb animal hearts.
It’s the anticipation I can’t handle. Loss lurks around every corner, and how do we prepare?
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. I have the feeling you’d have if there were a vault with all your jewels in it, everything precious, only the person with the combination to the lock was hanging on to a penthouse ledge by a fingertip.
Life is just seesawing between the gorgeous and the menacing—like when you go for a run and one minute the whole neighborhood is lilacs in purple bloom, and then the next it’s stained boxer shorts and an inside-out latex glove.
I pull the door closed on my way out. Everywhere, behind closed doors, people are dying, and people are grieving them. It’s the most basic fact about human life—tied with birth, I guess—but it’s so startling too. 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.
“It’s hard to talk about the d-word,” she says, and I look up, make eye contact with Alice, who mouths quizzically, Douche?
“We are stardust,” Cedar is singing. “We are golden.” All of us—we really are! Just a skyful of fourteen-billion-year-old stars that collapsed and supernova-ed their way into our cells via comets and Shakespeare and Chief Tecumseh and whoever all else ever lived and died and decomposed and became human again. And then one day Edi—and the rest of us too, of course—will become something else, someone else. Worms and soil, then a plant, a seed head, maybe, a loaf of bread, a piece of toast, the very stuff of somebody’s bones and flesh. And long after, when the earth bursts apart, maybe we become
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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.
