We All Want Impossible Things

by Catherine Newman

It’s monstrous. It is too much to take. Why do we even do this—love anybody?

But even right now, if I considered, say, the fact that my legs could be lost in an accident, I’d probably be inclined to saw them off preemptively with a bread knife. 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.

“I would give anything to keep you,” I say through the sob that’s gathering in my throat, and she says, “I know you would. I would give anything to stay.”

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.

Edi looks tragically gorgeous and comically alarmed, standing in her white spaghetti-strap gown and white satin Mary Janes, her dark hair pulled into a perfect chignon. I am behind her with a needle and thread, in my Dansko clogs and big silver hoop earrings, stitching her into her wedding dress moments before the ceremony. The fifty or so buttons running up its back turned out not to have been properly sewn on, and they’d all fallen off in my hands as I tried to button them. “This is okay, right?” she kept saying, and I kept saying back, from behind her, “This is completely fine! This is perfect.” “This is why I’m marrying you,” she said, and the photographer laughed.

the music and the conversation, and not talk to anyone. I want to be invisible and lie down on the couch and fall asleep to the muffled sounds of conversation, like a child in the back seat of the car being driven safely through the night by grown-ups who love her.

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.

“Now imagine the last breath,” Laura says, and I do. I already have.

This is love, distilled to its essence—like a kind of communal ecstasy, but grief.

It’s like we’ve all been digging and digging, shoveling out a hole, and we can finally stop. Only now there’s this hole here.

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.

Everything is unspooling inside me now. If I were a ball of yarn, I’d be just a stringy tangle on the floor. If I were a reservoir, I’d be overflowing my banks. Who I really need to talk to about all of this, of course, is Edi. “She’s going to miss everything now,” I sob.