The Fixed Stars

by Molly Wizenberg

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I came out of the womb eager to please. I got good grades, liked to read and write book reports for fun. I learned to believe that boys are mean when they like you, learned to watch what I ate. I was not discouraged from rocking the boat, but I also was not inclined to rock it more than gently.

mullioned

Nothing happened, but I felt bigger somehow. That I could be attracted to a woman, this woman, the way I was to men—the knowledge of this made me feel larger, my body capable of pulling in more air. I had imagined it would feel different to want a woman, different from wanting a man, but it didn’t. It felt expansive. Expansive, a word I couldn’t remember ever using, now instinctively in my mouth.

But, writes Annie Dillard, “how we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives. What we do with this hour, and that one, is what we are doing.”16

that one cannot live at one’s limits for long. One cannot stay there indefinitely, not even for love.

On Fresh Air, I listened to Terry Gross interview therapist Esther Perel.17 Gross: So you say sometimes when we seek the gaze of another it isn’t our partner we’re turning away from, but the person we’ve become. We’re looking for another version of ourselves. Can you expand on that for us? Perel: When you pick a partner, you pick a story. And that story becomes the life you live and the parts of you that become expressed. And sometimes you realize after years of living those parts of you that there are other parts of you that have virtually disappeared.

The fabric of any relationship needs tending and, over time, mending,

On Writing Well, by William Zinsser.

I wanted to know more about old love. I wanted to know how people become lodestars to one another. I wanted to feel the slow burn of it.

You know, my therapist said, you can leave a relationship healthy. You don’t have to destroy it. I remember he paused, then added: And you don’t have to destroy yourself.

“My takeaway is that love itself is not enough.”

Then there’s a subtler kind of teaching: what others say, if we hear it enough, will come to sound like truth.

I’d wanted so much to have a story that behaved, but instead I have a self.