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?

I suppose I’d been playing, the way I did sometimes when I was out there alone—making arcs, pointing my feet like a dancer— 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