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 was high and free and lonely. I closed my eyes, felt the tug of the water beneath me. Imagining the movement was the earth in motion and I could feel it turning.

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 and making my eyes brighter like after sex or after crying, sunlight catching the water beading on my shins.

the purpose of experience, of extending oneself to gain knowledge.

It was of great importance to me, when I was ten or eleven years old, to never give anyone a reason to laugh at me behind my back the way the boys had laughed at my mother.

And yet, we were both adults, and I felt for the first time deserving of a love that was not my mother’s.

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?

But then I remembered all those years between us, a gap wide enough to fall into. Eighteen years—a whole adolescence, a coming of age.

Its giving jacob and renesme lowkey

What I wanted to know from my mother was how to reconcile the fact that some people never find love. I am sure I said it that way, find, like a miraculous, unintentional discovery, as if love were a stone in the sand. But to be found also implies that something lost has been returned to its place of belonging, and what did I know about love and stones? I was still holding out for a kind of love that felt like homecoming.

Desire, I was only beginning to understand that day at the ruins, comes in many forms, and some of them are violent. We learn this in the stories we are told about love. Struck by an angel’s arrow or drugged by a loveflower,

desire wounds, and I had felt its blue sting. The thought of him all day, like pushing on a bruise.

But no father can protect his daughters from growing up and becoming the kinds of women who are bold enough to enter the houses of strange and solitary men. There is nothing that can protect them from the high wild loneliness of such a life or the desires that come with it. What you might do for a way out.

I searched his palms, trying to tell our future, but they only told stories about his past.

From child to mother to child again. For the first time, I felt a need to establish a life outside her purview, a life that was mine alone.

That I can see the same sadness in the photos of myself when I was small. That today, recognizing it as the sadness I’ve always had, I could almost call it by my own name, it’s so like me.

But my father kept sad quarters, and it seemed, for a long time, that the only men I knew were broken ones, who belonged to nothing and no one.

And of course I didn’t, not really, but I nodded along with him because I wanted to seem like a woman who knew something about love and its casualties—and maybe I did.

Sure, I would’ve. I did.

Jude sucks.

Up until that point, I’d

moved through the same general milestones in tandem with my peers—high school graduation followed by a year off to work or travel, then the four years of my degree. But for the first time it was becoming obvious to me that there was no one way to live your life. Each of us had to make her own choices, and in that we were all on our own.

I thought of Bonnie, soft and fair, her quiet and husky voice, and Petra with her frank way of speaking and slightly regal bearing. How could Jude fail to remember them? Were all young women interchangeable to him? Did he look at Bonnie and Petra and see only that? Young. Woman.

Tell me that you’ve never had anyone else. I want you to pretend. Okay, I said, laughing. I’ve never been with anyone else. Happy?

GASLIGHTER...DENIER....DOING ANYTHING TO GET YOUR ASS FARTHER! - The 3 wise women of The Chicks

Learning that one experience could contain so many things, that all the senses are associative.

I want to do everything right this time, he said. His strange mood from the night before had passed. And although I’d never been in a serious relationship, I felt like I knew how to do this too. Yes, I nodded. I’d been waiting my whole life to love and be loved like that.

Get this woman to a therapist that specialises in daddy issue stat.

Nothing, I wanted to say, nothing you could give me would ever be too much.

What he needed more than anything was to believe he needed nothing, that if I should ever leave, he’d remain the same man. But I had his key in my coat pocket and I was happy then, because it seemed like he was letting me in.

All that time, like a long extended girlhood. An absence of men’s things I hadn’t noticed until I moved in with Jude. How I’d missed them without realizing.

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.

By the time we had this conversation I was old enough to understand what talking about the future with a certain kind of man, in a certain kind of light, might cause you to do.

I think that on some level it embarrassed me—that I wanted what women have always been supposed to want.

There’s a certain type of man who loves to feel needed, necessary, she said. You know, to be of use. Playing the part of the protector, having someone to save. It’s a bird-with-a-broken-wing sort of thing.

Whatever story I wrote for myself must always begin with the story of their love, and in comparison, no love of mine could ever be as terrible or as true. Across time, my father and mother still touching through telephone wires, letters in the mail, the bones in my face, the blood that moved in me. Love could endure more than I had allowed for, I realized. Some things last a long time, and maybe there’s hope in that.

No one ever went blind from looking at the moon.

The ocean was always there, moving in the dark. Sometimes violent, tossing with restless rhythms, as if in a bad dream. Sometimes gentle, like a mother soothing a child to sleep, or a lover’s breath. There was something tidal, too, about love. Each day, rushing forward or receding, growing closer or farther apart.

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

THERE MUST BE PEOPLE out there who are not drawn to the shadow of what could have been, who feel no pull toward the other lives they could be living, but I certainly have never been one of them.

But nothing had really happened yet, I thought. What I’d lost, it seemed it was and would only ever be imaginary. What was I crying for, except the loss of one vision of what my life might have been, one I’d lived out in dreams? As all lovers learn, when love ends, you lose the future as well as the past.

It didn’t occur to me that perhaps a home is never a fixed or stable thing but something that can be carried with you and remade.