We All Want Impossible Things

by Catherine Newman

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.

But sometimes I worried that marriage was just a series of these small deflations, our dreams floating around invisibly near the ceiling like escaped gas.

I were going to summarize it, I’d tell you that I can’t be with a person who, in the middle of the worst fight ever, leaves me weeping in the bed to take a shower,

Honey loved me, I knew, but I wanted to be kept up all night, to doze in desire and wake to an astonished somebody tracing their finger down the side of my face. Honey was too rational for that in some ways, and too damaged for it in others. He’d learned not to feel too much growing up, while his mother drank herself to death. He’d learned to look away.

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.

It’s the anticipation I can’t handle. Loss lurks around every corner, and how do we prepare?

“Did the word boo-boo come from bubo?” she asks. “Like, during the bubonic plague? Like, Here, sweetie, it’s just a little bubo, let Mama kiss it better?”

I married a person who just wants to say yes to everything, and I basically forced him to say no to our marriage. How did this happen?

“Ash is the person who thought the Rotary Club met to talk about the flow of traffic.”

there was so much warmth inside me, so much love still—but nothing could get out. Instead, I’d become a robot

“Feeling sorry for yourself is not a pie,” Belle says gently, misquoting my favorite Amy Bloom story—“Love Is Not a Pie.” “There’s plenty of it to go around, so you can just totally help yourself.” “Thank you,” I say.

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.

She is unbearable, and I love her against my will.

apeirophobia,

“You are secretly a dick, and I’m the only person in the world who knows it,” I say, but I’m laughing, and he says, “I know. I love you too.”

One thing I’ve started to suspect about myself is that I’m some kind of confusingly extroverted introvert.

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.

It’s occurring to me only now that the dying and the loss are actually two different burdens, and each must be borne individually, one after the other. It’s like after a grueling delivery, when they hand it to you and you’re like, Oh! The baby! because your focus had become so narrow and personal during the birth. But now here was the actual end point, which you’d always known but then forgotten in all of the incarnated drama and suffering.

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.

What I’m starting to understand, finally, is that the point isn’t to help the people who know how best to ask for help. It’s to be helpful.

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