Thirst for Salt

by Madelaine Lucas

Jude thought we should be like a gift to each other, but I longed to be essential. That was love, I decided, as our intimacy changed and deepened over the course of the year. Not being able to do without. Wanting—that was just desire, fluid and changeable as the tide. Need was real love, the truest kind I’d known, born as it is out of what we lack, and that was how I felt about Jude back then—that he completed me, we completed each other, as in the old myth about the origin of love.

I loved best in gestures, in metaphors, and I wanted to build a life out of what I loved. Metaphors are lies, one of my professors had said in a lecture during my first year of university. How then, I might argue with her now, in the absence of figurative language, are we supposed to talk about love? Love, we say, and expect the word to hold so many things.

Could a quiet love like mine be just as true?

told him that I’d always been afraid of wanting anything so badly that it becomes visible.