Thirst for Salt

by Madelaine Lucas

How could I not be hung up on the past, I wanted to say to my mother, when so many things I’d loved had been left behind there?

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? And his answer, which never quite satisfied: If I didn’t, would I still be here in bed with you? It’s not so easy, I’d tried on one occasion to explain, to tell what keeps people together, what makes them fall apart. You can leave someone and still love them. You can lie with someone and never love them at all.

I didn’t know the violence of it then—that erasure. I liked the idea of Jude made into a clean slate for me, my touch negating all others’, so sure then I would be the one, the last, to make an indelible mark. I wanted so badly for it to be true. That we might be like two virgins.

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.

Jude, I would learn, needed not to feel bound to anyone—love with a loose leash. To return not out of obligation but of his own free will, and for me to trust that he would. To Jude, that was love. That trust. He needed my faith in him in order to feel free.

I think now that Jude kept me waiting that night to prove to me, and to himself, that he could.

So sure, in these moments, that if he ever tried to leave me, I wouldn’t let him. Undignified, the scene I’d make. Not too proud to beg. I’d wrap myself around his legs the way I used to hang from my father’s when I was a child and he would come to visit—remembering the way he used to play along, swinging me from his boot with each heavy stride. I wanted us to be like rocks or anchors, keeping each other in place. Love, I’d read, was supposed to be a light and weightless feeling, but I had always longed for gravity.

Feeling my pulse quicken and the heat rush to my face at the thought of my dream-baby. That was something private. I didn’t want to share it with anybody, not even Jude. I think that on some level it embarrassed me—that I wanted what women have always been supposed to want.

I do miss you, I thought, though he was right there with me, standing in the morning light, and I was holding him.

IN THE WEEKS THAT FOLLOWED, WE LIVED TOGETHER IN the humbled quiet of two people who are no longer lovers. Careful not to touch or linger, the house full of evidence.

But at night our bodies betrayed us. We fell together in the dark, finding the shape of each other as if easing into well-worn clothes. Grabbing at wrists, handfuls of hair, trying to find something to hold on to. Waking curled around one another like two animals sleeping together for warmth. It was sad to greet the morning that way, in such old, familiar intimacy, and remember the distance with which we now conducted our lives. Was this intimacy too? Strained and cautious. Slowly building back up all the barriers we’d broken through. Falling in love in reverse.