We All Want Impossible Things

by Catherine Newman

Three weeks is a long time at hospice, but also, because of what hospice means, it kind of flies by. But it flies by crawlingly, like a funhouse time warp. Like life with a newborn: It’s breakfast, all milk and sunshine, and then it’s feeding and changing that recur forever, on a loop, like some weird soiled nighties circle of hell.

Hospice is a complicated place to pass the time because you are kind of officially dying.

I’m an elderly mastodon, trying to understand the ways of the young humans,

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 do like a man who likes a cat.

I want impossible things.