Here is what I learned once I began studying whooping cranes: only a small part of studying them has anything to do with the birds. Instead we counted berries. Counted crabs. Measured water salinity. Stood in the mud. Measured the speed of the wind.

It turns out, if you want to save a species, you don’t spend your time staring at the bird you want to save. You look at the things it relies on to live instead. You ask if there is enough to eat and drink. You ask if there is a safe place to sleep. Is there enough here to survive?

Wading through the muck of the Aransas reserve, I understood that every chance for food matters. Every pool of drinkable water matters. Every wolfberry dangling from a twig, in Texas, in January, matters. The difference between sustaining life and not having enough was that small.

If there were a kind of rehab for people ashamed to have needs, maybe this was it. You will go to the Gulf. You will count every wolfberry. You will measure the depth of each puddle.

More than once I’d said to my fiancé, “How am I supposed to know you love me if you’re never affectionate or say nice things to me or say that you love me?”

He reminded me that he’d said “I love you” once or twice before. Why couldn’t I just know that he did in perpetuity?

I told him this was like us going on a hiking trip and his telling me he had water in his backpack but not ever giving it to me and then wondering why I was still thirsty.

He told me water wasn’t like love, and he was right.

There are worse things than not receiving love. There are sadder stories than this. There are species going extinct, and a planet warming. I told myself: Who are you to complain, you with these frivolous extracurricular needs?

In the mornings we made one another sandwiches and in the evenings we laughed and lent one another fresh socks. We gave one another space in the bathroom. Forgave one another for telling the same stories over and over again. We helped Warren when he had trouble walking. What I am saying is that we took care of one another. What I am saying is we took pleasure in doing so. It’s hard to confess, but in the time after I called off my wedding, the week I spent dirty and tired on the Gulf, I was happy.

He hadn’t said one specific thing about me or us during the proposal, and on the long trail walk out of the park I felt robbed of the kind of special declaration I’d hoped a proposal would entail, and, in spite of hating myself for wanting this, hating myself more for fishing for it, I asked him: “Why do you love me? Why do you think we should get married? Really?”

He said he wanted to be with me because I wasn’t annoying or needy. Because I liked beer. Because I was low-maintenance.

I didn’t say anything. A little farther down the road he added that he thought I’d make a good mother.

This wasn’t what I hoped he would say. But it was what was being offered. And who was I to want more?

I told Lindsay because she was beautiful and kind and patient and loved good things like birds and I wondered what she would say back to me. What would every good person I knew say to me when I told them that the wedding to which they’d RSVP’d was off and that the life I’d been building for three years was going to be unstitched and repurposed?

Lindsay said it was brave not to do a thing just because everyone expected you to do it.

Jeff was sitting outside, in front of the cabin with Warren, as Lindsay and I talked, tilting the sighting scope so it pointed toward the moon. The screen door was open and I knew he’d heard me, but he never said anything about my confession.

What he did do was let me drive the boat.

The next day it was just him and me and Lindsay on the water. We were cruising fast and loud. “You drive,” Jeff shouted over the motor. Lindsay grinned and nodded. I had never driven a boat before. “What do I do?” I shouted. Jeff shrugged. I took the wheel. We cruised past small islands, families of pink roseate spoonbills, garbage tankers swarmed by seagulls, blowing fields of grass and wolfberries, and I realized it was not that remarkable for a person to understand what another person needed.

This is a sad story only inasmuch as stories about people like me, who delude themselves, are sad. So maybe it’s not so sad at all.

I tried to help Joey because I thought that without the distraction of all his miseries—which seemed to me so easily solvable—he would finally love me properly. He would take care of me the way I’d been taking care of him. I would fix and fix and fix until he was able to notice that I was standing there, hoping to be loved. But of course it doesn’t work that way.

Would a good person be deterred by these things? I asked myself. Was it ethical to disqualify a person as a partner for any of these reasons? How would someone, most people, react to these profiles?

I told myself that someone, most people, would be fine with them. Excited, even. They would go on dates with these men. They would enjoy these dates. And so I forced myself to hover outside my own mind, and override my own, true, human reactions with what I thought a good and ethical and generally less-strange person would do.

I wasn’t a Scully looking for a Mulder, I was a person seeking some sort of mutual trust. I was a person who wanted to believe that two people with wildly different ways of being in the world, which is, let’s be honest, most any two people of any genders, could come to trust each other as a matter of pure instinct. That you didn’t need to believe all the same things, or have lived the same lives, in order for trust to be possible. That difference is just difference. It’s just human. It doesn’t need to activate into some perfect complementary cycle. It doesn’t need to be pathologized. You just have to believe the other person’s things are real and valid, too. You just need to know that if you called them, they would pick up the phone. That it would almost be beside the point to say, It’s me, because they would know

As you remember, you were badly dressed but skinny, with gravity-defying tits and an ass the boys sometimes slapped at school, even if you were wearing something patently unsexy like those striped train-conductor overalls you loved. You were frizzy-haired and plain-faced and privileged and sweet and moody. You were tediously Pollyannaish about anything to do with social justice and performatively contrarian about everything else. You kept a shrine to John Lennon in your bedroom at the center of which was this satisfyingly heavy biography you’d never read but in front of which you lit flying-fairy Chinatown incense. You liked to say you were “born at the wrong time.” You preferred animals and children to anyone else. You had no idea what to do with your body but you were always already a hedonistic little ball of senses and you understood pleasure. You loved music and food and the smell of the boy’s armpits and being touched. You had enormous eyes and enormous ears and you were just cripplingly earnest, but, having been raised by fast-talking New Yorkers and having consumed too much art, sometimes disarmingly adult banter came dropping from your mouth and the contrast must have been alarming. You were happiest alone in the woods or with a book. You cried over things like the fact that flowers didn’t bloom for that long. That they had to die. Seriously, literally, you cried about this. You had just turned seventeen and the facts of the world were pressing in on you for the first time with a sort of tedious, metaphysical, white-girl sadness that felt too much to bear. And he was the first one who said to you, Hey, people have like, written poems about that stuff, you know? And songs. Do you know Keats? David Byrne? He showed you how to find yourself in this way. Introduced you to the sacred texts of the terminally sensitive.

Since having people I loved in the house made it feel better, I decided I might try love again. I let myself fall for a funny, handsome man I’d had a crush on for many years, since the first moment I saw him, really, even though I knew he lived abroad. I went and found him in Paris and we climbed all the steps of Montmartre to hang out in Moroccan bars, and eavesdrop on the singing inside the Lapin Agile, and to sit outside the Metro station sipping beers, watching the tides of people coming and going. When he came to stay with me in my house it was midwinter, and it snowed so hard there was nothing for us to do, and I worried about how my house was not as good as Paris. But the snow bucketed down and we played guitar and had sex all day and it was perfect. And then my house was a house where I had feelings again, where I had sex again. And after he left, I cried, but a house where you have cried over multiple heartbreaks is infinitely better than a house where you’ve only cried over one, defining, bad thing.