maalvika

“For years, I have convinced myself that love is meant to be an act of extreme and transformative caretaking. And so I’ve been more savior than partner. More robot than girl. More nurse than lover.”
― C.J. Hauser, The Crane Wife: A Memoir in Essays

“After the death of the poet Jane Kenyon, her husband Donald Hall wrote, “We did not spend our days gazing into each other’s eyes. We did that gazing when we made love or when one of us was in trouble, but most of the time our gazes met and entwined as they looked at a third thing. Third things are essential to marriages, objects or practices or habits or arts or institutions or games or human beings that provide a site of joint rapture or contentment. Each member of a couple is separate; the two come together in double attention.”
― John Green, The Anthropocene Reviewed: Essays on a Human-Centered Planet

“I'll never again speak to many of the people who loved me into this moment, just as you will never speak to many of the people who loved you into your now. So we raise a glass to them--and hope that perhaps somewhere, they are raising a glass to us.”
― John Green, The Anthropocene Reviewed: Essays on a Human-Centered Planet

“People know how it goes. It’s harder to tell the story of how I convinced myself I didn’t need what was necessary to survive. How I convinced myself it was my lack of needs that made me worthy of love.”
― C.J. Hauser, The Crane Wife: A Memoir in Essays