We All Want Impossible Things

by Catherine Newman

Life is just seesawing between the gorgeous and the menacing—like when you go for a run and one minute the whole neighborhood is lilacs in purple bloom, and then the next it’s stained boxer shorts and an inside-out latex glove.

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.

Sleep, which has been playing a dully exhausting game of hide-and-seek with me for months, shows up out of nowhere and drags me to the bottom of the ocean floor, where I dream the deep-sea dreams of the drowned. Of the oblivious.

“Aging.” Jonah sighs. “It’s not for the faint of heart.” “I guess it beats not aging,” Alice says, and Jonah says, “Too true.”

Is it better to have loved and lost? Ask anyone in pain and they’ll tell you no. And yet. Here we are, hurling ourselves headlong into love like lemmings off a cliff into a churning sea of grief. We risk every last thing for our heart’s expansion, even when that expanded heart threatens to suffocate us and then burst.

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

My whole life with the girls is telescoped into this moment—running away, running back. Fly, be free! I want to say. I want to say, Stay with me forever! Come