The Crane Wife / CJ Hauser

You can get rid of everything else, the phone numbers and the photos, and still you will have these stories banging around inside you.

This is the first time you understand that, when people talk about moving on, they don’t mean that you won’t remember or bleed anymore. Just that you’ll go on to do other things. Meet other people. And yet, in the middle of a normal day, something as simple as a stone wall can still suddenly and invisibly destroy you. And because it’s too much to explain, most days, when this happens, you’ll just keep driving along. You won’t mention the wall or what it summons to anyone. And it’s this silence, more than anything else, that defines moving on.

p. 32

That’s what I wanted, I decided. A Dex. Someone who sees you for the horror show you are, and opts in. Someone who relentlessly sees what’s wrong with you, and pushes you to be better. That, I decided, was the most honest way of being in love.

p. 47

I need you to know: I hated that I needed more than this from him. There is nothing more humiliating to me than my own desires. Nothing that makes me hate myself more than being burdensome and less than self-sufficient. I did not want to feel like the kind of nagging woman who might exist in a sit-com.

These were small things, and I told myself it was stupid to feel disappointed by them. I had arrived in my thirties believing that to need things from others made you weak. I think this is true for lots of people but I think it is especially true for women. When men desire things, they are “passionate.” When they feel they have not received something they need, they are “deprived,” or even “emasculated,” and given permission for all sorts of behavior. But when a woman needs, she is needy. She is meant to contain within her own self everything necessary to be happy.

p. 75

Back then, I was in the autopsy business. Dissecting my failed relationships in search of answers. From every relationship postmortem came new rules about what I should and should not do in the next one. My autopsy rules multiplied over time, until there were so many I could hardly keep track of them. But I kept doing it, because maybe, if I investigated my own failures closely enough, I could pretend that love, that life, was an endeavor a person could undertake with only a reasonable amount of risk.

In short, I was trying to science the shit out of my love life. And of all of my theories, metrics, and madnesses, none messed me up more than my experiments in Scullymulderism.

p. 133