We All Want Impossible Things

by Catherine Newman

We were trying to understand, then, what her life was about to become. I think we’re still trying to understand.

And so we held her quietly. We held her while the biggest loss of her life—which was bigger than the loss of her actual life—sank into her like mercury.

I packed up my sorrow in an ugly box and hoped it would evaporate.

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.

At the risk of sounding like a diamond commercial, we share a lifetime of memories,

Not knowing seems to be all I know anymore.”

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.

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.

“I think what we’re between,” Alice says, “is the Twilight Zone and some other fuckery.” And this is more accurate than we can even understand just yet.