The Crane Wife by CJ Hauser

Author:CJ Hauser [Hauser, CJ]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2022-07-12T00:00:00+00:00

Fifteen years later, and this story should have released its hold on me, but instead, I time-travel to it again and again, performing a penance that serves no one. I agonize over the pain I caused. I yell at myself: Just know yourself better. Just be less confused. Just be always already fully aware of who you are and what you want.

I did move to Brooklyn and I kissed some people I pleased, but not many. If I’m honest, I felt like the Black Cat had blocked me. Things had gone so badly before I could ever be with Maggie properly that the experience never became the coming-out story it might have been for me. Instead, it was a story I couldn’t tell to anyone. Even tell to myself. The shame of it was too much.

I held back from speaking out loud who I was, and that lack of speaking out loud meant, that for a long time, more often than not, I wound up kissing men. Because who had heard I wanted anything else? A while ago, on a date with a woman I’d had a crush on for a long time, she said she hadn’t been sure if I was queer or not. We had both been flirting with each other at a wedding two years prior, but neither of us had been bold enough to kiss the other, and it was this not-knowing, more than anything else, that had stood in our way.

Standing at the counter of a jazz bar in DC, I made excuses. “I mean, my friends know I’m bi,” I said. “My parents know.” She shrugged and smiled.

I was still being so quiet. I was still not saying things out loud. It had prevented us from recognizing what we wanted at that wedding. Prevented our kissing, which finally arrived, in that jazz bar, on a night when so many people had turned out to play that the room was more musicians than listeners, more music than talk, and I understood that, if this was what my quiet had been drowning out, I should probably get loud.

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