'The Distance of the Moon' Was a Weird Read

I chose to read Italo Calvino's short story, The Distance of the Moon', for our Literary Speculation section and it was....bizarre. Surely not the weirdest thing I've ever read but it certainly turned into something I wasn't expecting. It starts with someone older telling one of those "back in my day" sorts of stories about how the moon used to be right upon them and starts to go into the finer details of exactly how that worked. This lore is what hooked me in. It started to get a bit weird when they went into this "milk" that the moon apparently produces and how they would harvest it. That didn't throw me off completely, though, as it was still giving part into the lore of the moon and these people's relationship with it. This is also when the story started to shift more into a weird love triangle revolving around the narrator, his deaf cousin, and a married woman, and this is where it lost me. What began as a story about a people and their relationship with the moon which came down close enough that they could climb onto it turned into an uncomfortable romance. I wasn't quite sure what to make of it. The narrator loves the sea Captain's wife because he managed to grope her on the way down from the moon I guess? And after the narrator and her get stuck on the moon she ends up refusing to go back to earth because she has realized the narrator's cousin will never love her the way he loves the moon? So it's better to be close to the thing he loves? I guess it could be perceived as beautiful in a sad sort of way if you squint your eyes for long enough and tilt your head in the right direction. It's not that it's a bad story by any means but I guess it's not what I was looking for getting out of it.