We All Want Impossible Things

by Catherine Newman

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 just want this. Not even the sex exactly, but the being wanted.

I want impossible things.

It’s monstrous. It is too much to take. Why do we even do this—love anybody? Our dumb animal hearts.

I’m just going to let you go with a warning today, okay?” “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.

he’s going to feel like he’ll never get over his first heartbreak, but he will, she promises him, he will feel better and better until there’s just a tiny invisible scar where his heart healed

“I think you might be the kindest smoking-hot person I’ve ever met,”

I feel like I’m trying to love a scalpel.”

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?

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.

I have never been so sad and happy in my entire life.

This is love, distilled to its essence—like a kind of communal ecstasy, but grief.

I can feel how embarrassed he is to be so old and alive.

Here’s my etiquette advice about how to write a good thank-you note: Don’t have slept with everybody.

Fly, be free! I want to say. I want to say, Stay with me forever! Come to think of it, these are the two things I want to say to everyone I love most.