Thirst for Salt

by Madelaine Lucas

You tend to your loneliness like a garden, she’d said once during my last year of university,

There was a sadness in this, that was perhaps the sadness of all grown daughters, for it forced me to admit that she was growing older too, and I did not want to reckon with the vulnerability that would come with her aging.

And anyway, every time is like the first time. That’s the beauty of love. Love erases.

I could love her easily, abundantly, where with Jude I had to be so careful to parcel out my affections in case I scared him away.

A silent thanking in the dark of all the women who had come before me and broken him in. Thinking of what my mother said, like horses.

Longing to have known him as a boy, that somehow I could have taken care of him like a mother and also grown up to be his lover—a strange but true feeling—and maybe that’s when it started, the desire to have a baby that would be ours together.

pathos. I believed he’d seen things, known things,

that insecurity of early love. It gains a sweetness once love has aged and deepened. We’d

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

There is no end to grief, because there is no end to love.

always understood myself in relation to her.