We All Want Impossible Things

by Catherine Newman

It’s afternoon, but nobody’s too picky about what counts as morning or lunch or nighttime or, really, time in general.

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

I assume it’s not a coincidence that the closer people get to death, the more you see the extent to which we’re all just skeletons in elaborate, fleshy waiting rooms.

“All of that caretaking,” I say. I lean back so I can look at her. I’m crying too. Crying and talking. “All of it’s in his bones. It’s the actual stuff of his body and brain. The placenta you made from scratch. Your milk from nursing him. All those pancakes and school-lunch sandwiches, all of that food and care.” She’s looking into my face, nodding, even though I am fully winging it now, panicking, words pouring out like I’m a hose on the weepy consolation setting. “Everything you’ve ever fed him,” I say. “His whole self is made completely out of your love.”

“Are you popping a pimple on your chin with the pin of an Obama badge?

Honey looked abjectly terrified, like he’d seen a ghost, and that ghost was the ghost of his future marriage, when his warm and laughing wife would have turned into a weeping poltergeist, haunting him with her many obstetric feelings.

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.

“And anyways, I was just trying to show you the way that one scar intersects with my C-section scar from Dash. It’s, like, a whole situation down there.” “I know,” I say, and then I open my mouth to say something else—who even knows what—and she waves her arm to shush me. I understand. What can I say about this topographical mapping of birth and death? Everything is right there. Right here.

I love you, but you want impossible things, Ash,” he said, finally, and it was true. It still is. I want impossible things.

“Thank you,” I say, crying. “But you should do whatever you need to do. I don’t want to just be, like, this crying entitled white lady in the middle of your day who doesn’t get a ticket.” “Well, I don’t know you, but today, yeah, that’s pretty much what you are. Good luck with your friend.”

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.

News reports to the contrary, teenagers today seem so much kinder and smarter and more innocent than we were at that age.

They lost all of their teeth under this roof! They lost all of their baby fat! They turned skinny and pimply and furious, and then sleek and kind and hilarious. But I lost something too—something besides my marriage—only I’m not sure I understand exactly what it was.

“That’s all I want, Ash. Just to love and be loved.” She’s crying now. I’m crying too. “My imperfect marriage. My family. My life—to keep it. I’m sorry. I know this is guilt trippy. But what I’m losing? You’re choosing to give it up.” “I’m so sorry, Edi,” I say. I’m sitting on the edge of her bed now, holding her hands. “But also, it’s not that simple.”

I meant to say how I was really feeling—there was so much warmth inside me, so much love still—but nothing could get out. Instead, I’d become a robot set to hyperbolic shrew: “You never,” I said. “You always.” “I would be less lonely if I lived alone,” I said, and I said, “That’s total bullshit.” I remember thinking that fighting with Honey was like fighting with a tub of cream cheese: There wasn’t a ton of resistance, but then somehow you couldn’t get out again. Around the time I was thinking this, Honey said out loud: “I feel like I’m trying to love a scalpel.” I knew what he meant. But really I was like a tragic squid, sending out clouds of poisonous ink and crying, Why won’t you see me? Why can’t you find me?

One thing I’ve started to suspect about myself is that I’m some kind of confusingly extroverted introvert. I just want to sit here on the couch with a tumblerful of the good booze Alice brought, soak in the music and the conversation, and not talk to anyone. I want to be invisible and lie down on the couch and fall asleep to the muffled sounds of conversation, like a child in the back seat of the car being driven safely through the night by grown-ups who love her.