Thirst for Salt

by Madelaine Lucas

Who is to say what love is or what it wants to be, the shape it takes, or how quickly it comes on? Love has always made a fool of time.

Love, he would tell me, is all about choice. Free will. Need is about dependency.

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. And if I was essential, the other half of whatever he was, then he could never abandon me.

Yes, I ruined my books, like he’d said on the day that we met. I turned the pages with wet hands, salt and sand dried in the margins, the edges warped in waves, I spilled coffee, crumbs, blood from a chewed fingernail. And in this way the books held my life, were my life—