We All Want Impossible Things

by Catherine Newman

We’ve taken to eating in here, even, which seems like a dangerous trend, a slippery slope that’s slip-sliding us into a dumpster future filled with garbage and rats, but I don’t seem to have the energy to fight it.

Why do we even do this—love anybody? Our dumb animal hearts.

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

“I feel like you should either be dying and feel good,” Edi says now, “or you should be in pain but getting better. It’s not fair to feel shitty and die.”

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.

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.