We All Want Impossible Things

by Catherine Newman

There’s nothing like hospice to remind you that decrepitude is totally relative.

I do like a man who likes a cat.

But now you’re thinking Honey’s perfect and why aren’t we together and probably it’s my fault, and you’re right about all of it, more or less. If 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, where I hear him joyfully singing “No Woman, No Cry.” “Were you singing in the shower?” I’d said when he came cheerfully back into the room with a Q-tip in each ear, and he’d scrunched up his nose, said, “Oof. Was I?” “Do you have any actual human feelings?” I’d asked, and he hadn’t answered, sensibly, because it was a trick question. “What do you want from me, Ash?” he asked, and I said, “More.” I did. I wanted more.

The sun rises and sets, rises and sets, calendar pages fly off the wall, the roses bud, open, wilt, drop all their petals, the ice caps finish melting, the seas rise, and finally Edi is ready to go. “I kind of have to pee,” she says, and I laugh, say, “Okay.”

“Aren’t you furious?” I’d pressed, and he shrugged. “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.

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 wanted to pick and choose, to Frankenstein together some monstrous array of qualities that could never actually exist in a single person who didn’t have visible bolts in their neck.

“I feel like I’m trying to love a scalpel.”

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 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.

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