Thirst for Salt

by Madelaine Lucas

I’d been a quiet child, and a dreamy, introspective adolescent. You tend to your loneliness like a garden,

and maybe what I wanted, what I longed for, lying there with the ocean outlining mine, was to be held in the way you’re supposed to be when you’re no longer a child.

because in the water I could love my body the way I never did on land. In the water, I was graceful, a light and buoyant thing. I knew this to be my better self, the most fully alive, my lungs filling with air, salt tangling my hair and making my eyes brighter like after sex or after crying, sunlight catching the water beading on my shins.

I wore my shyness like a cloak that obscured me from view, and as a consequence, any advances I made carried a certain intensity that, I sensed, was unnerving—as if I’d abruptly revealed myself.

Always the beggar for his love. I was like the desperate ocean, wearing away at him. The ceaseless questioning of the tide to the shore that I heard from our bedroom window all winter long. Asking, Do you love me? Do you love me?

Who is to say what love is or what it wants to be, the shape it takes, or how quickly it comes on? Love has always made a fool of time.

It is easy, I have learned, to mistake solitude for softness, for depth. She liked being near him.

Truth

I could see for the first time how it might feel good to make mistakes with someone, sway together, embrace the drift. And maybe I sensed it, wanted it then. The ways we might either break each other in or burn each other up.

Could a quiet love like mine be just as true?

And while I was slow to trust, to let people in, I loved without reservation

for I knew abandonment to be an irredeemable act. Once you leave, there is never any guarantee you won’t leave again.

Women are born with all their eggs in their ovaries, like the seeds of a fruit. I’d been with my mother since she’d been in my grandmother’s womb, and now I was sleeping in her bed and my mother was in the next room sleeping in her mother’s. It made me think of us like Russian dolls. Women carried inside women carried inside women.

Beautiful analogy. Wow.