We All Want Impossible Things

by Catherine Newman

“In the end there’s more beauty in the imperfection,”

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?

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.

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.