He only has to find a woman who has already built it around herself, and move in, and enjoy the free labor of a person who has been taught to mistake her own erasure for her finest quality.

For twenty years I was needed in that house — constantly, urgently, exhaustingly needed — and I told myself that being needed that much must mean I was loved that much, when the truth is that they are nearly opposite conditions.

You can be needed by people who do not love you at all, who in fact love that you are useful precisely because it spares them the trouble of loving you.

Being needed is about what you do for them.

Being loved is about who you are to them.

I spent twenty years being needed, and dying slowly of the difference, and it took a dying woman’s letter to show me I had been starving at a table I thought was full.