Thirst for Salt

by Madelaine Lucas

What I wanted to know from my mother was how to reconcile the fact that some people never find love. I am sure I said it that way, find, like a miraculous, unintentional discovery, as if love were a stone in the sand. But to be found also implies that something lost has been returned to its place of belonging, and what did I know about love and stones? I was still holding out for a kind of love that felt like homecoming.

Desire, I was only beginning to understand that day at the ruins, comes in many forms, and some of them are violent. We learn this in the stories we are told about love. Struck by an angel’s arrow or drugged by a loveflower, desire wounds, and I had felt its blue sting. The thought of him all day, like pushing on a bruise.

What was I waiting for, perched on the edge of his bed? Some confirmation that it might be something more. Always wary because I sensed my capacity for loving was bottomless. I thought then that unlike me, Jude trusted easily, believed in the kindness of strangers, left his door unlocked and open for anyone to walk right in.

The thing about sharks, he’d said, is that at heart they’re ambivalent. Put yourself in their way and they’ll bite, but it’s not about hunger, or need. What we might be tempted to call fate is really just a matter of convenience.

Jude thought we should be like a gift to each other, but I longed to be essential.

Wrapping my arms around Jude’s waist. In that moment, I felt so lucky I thought I might die. The only way I can understand this now is that what I was feeling, standing in his kitchen all those years ago, was a presentiment of loss.

What kind of woman would I have to be to keep him?

I think now that this is something that happens in small families—roles get confused, relationships do double duty. So a daughter might play the part of an overprotective parent, or a mother might rely on the daughter like a partner. Mother as runaway child, daughter as mother, daughter as husband.

What continues to surprise me, and what I still don’t understand, is not the reasons that love ends but the way that it endures.