Thirst for Salt

by Madelaine Lucas

Such a long time since I’d seen or heard from him, though sometimes, lonely and between lovers, I looked him up online.

Briefly, it seemed like I had stumbled across an image from another life. That what I had seen was none other than the unrealized possibility of our long-ago love.

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?

Now, I sit beneath the lamp in the spare room at the desk that once belonged to my grandmother, drawn back to it by that same compulsion I’ve had since childhood to write things down, to document.

All her new beginnings took the shape of freshly painted walls, a roof under which nothing bad had ever happened. No wine spilled on the carpet, no fist-shaped hole through the drywall.

I’d been a quiet child, and a dreamy, introspective adolescent. You tend to your loneliness like a garden, she’d said once during my last year of university,

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.

I preferred to keep my eyes closed when I went swimming, moving blindly stroke by stroke. Happier not to know what might be out there, circling.

It felt good in the way a minor transgression can, like taking a drag off a cigarette or kissing a stranger.

I was shy, and I wore my shyness like a cloak that obscured me from view, and as a consequence, any advances I made carried a certain intensity that, I sensed, was unnerving—as if I’d abruptly revealed myself.

I had no easy way with strangers. Always giving away too much, or saying too little. It seemed clear I had missed some essential lesson.

as a girl I had gone through a phase of being punctilious and prim.

Rain on the tin roof, hesitant at first, and then thunder like something finally cracking open.

From the beginning, I wanted us to be equals, I wanted to know all the things he knew—an impossible wish, but a true one.

Furniture is for living in. Can’t be too precious about it. A bit of wear adds character, shows you your habits, the pressure you put on things. You can tell a lot about a person from a chair, or their kitchen table.

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? It’s not so easy, I’d tried on one occasion to explain, to tell what keeps people together, what makes them fall apart. You can leave someone and still love them. You can lie with someone and never love them at all.

The feeling that nothing else existed, that we were outside of time, the way all lovers wish themselves to be.

It’s okay, you know, just to want someone. Nothing to be ashamed about.

I wish you could fall in love for the first time again. Or that you’d never loved anybody else before me and neither had I.

I remembered the artist I’d studied who had once sat in a gallery and invited the audience to, one by one, cut a piece from her clothes. Some people took a tiny snip from somewhere inconspicuous—a hemline or a sleeve—while others sheared her suit away at the seams, snipping the straps of her underwear until she was stripped bare, exposed. Yes, I thought. Love could be something like that.

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.

Something lonely deep down in the bone. A marrowed loneliness, passed down womb to womb. We wanted to believe, my mother and I, that love could restore what was beyond repair, and if not, at least let us walk around in the wreckage.

Call it Portrait of the Man before He Was a Father. Portrait of the Lover before the House of Love Burned Down.

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.

It is easy, I have learned, to mistake solitude for softness, for depth.

So, in the way of lonely people, we let each other go.

Love had a way of doing that, I would learn. It could collapse or rearrange time the way I’d thought only art or memory could.

Jude always did his best not to live in the modern world, and in a way we had this in common—both of us out of step with the present, longing for some other time, some other place.

Afterward, I’d sit out there and smoke beside the fake flowers and fairy lights I’d wound around the iron railing when I first moved in—my early version of homemaking.

I looked down at my thighs, blue veins and broken capillaries and pale skin, and felt an old fear that my body was transparent, making a map of every pleasure, pain, and injury for anyone to see.

Though maybe it was a female thing, I thought later, to feel vulnerability where a man might have felt power, but still I longed to see him cracked open under my hands in return, while I remained clothed and composed.

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

Kissing with eyes squeezed closed, shut tight. And even then, they had been boys. Slim-shouldered and thin. Remembering the one I had a crush on for years in university. His hair was almost as long as mine and instead of taking his face in my hands or telling him my feelings, I used to braid it at parties and roll him thin and perfect joints as a testament of my devotion.

The books Jude brought me had been handled, covers worn, spines showing through the threadbare binding like a skinned knee. I liked the way they felt haunted by other hands, the feeling that time didn’t really keep us apart, wasn’t an unbreachable gap.

Bonnie took good care of her things because she had moved to the city to become someone different, neat and put together. Someone with boundaries. No more running barefoot through the paddocks of her parents’ farm in Mullumbimby with mud up to her knees or driving home drunk, packed into the back of someone else’s car, sitting on some boy’s lap, rushing past the highway memorials left behind after other accidents—white crosses and fake flowers slick with rain, stuffed animals soaked through and heavy with water.

In those moments, it came to me like a shock: I am my mother’s daughter. It was her face, blinking back at me in surprise. Something wild about us, our frayed edges.

Simple to hold Bonnie’s hand or link her arm in mine. 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.

I was a greedy lover, he teased, and I was, I was, this desire, this pleasure, unknown and new.

Unrequited love is still love, he said. But it’s never a great love. Can’t be. It’s one-sided. Except in the case of the ocean. For the ocean, we can make an exception.

I didn’t know how to love like that, in bold gestures. My expressions were small: a folded love note buried in a jacket pocket, a drafted email addressed and sent to no one. Could a quiet love like mine be just as true?

I was so eager to be loved by him, to be held in his arms and reassured, to shut out the ghosts of other girlfriends from the room like a cold draft, I said nothing more.

Sleeping nude and waking for the first time to the morning chill. Arms and shoulders cooled. Breakfast in bed, kissing jammy fingers. Toast crumbs sticking to bare skin, coffee spilled on the sheets.Jude

It was that stage of love, where even the most mundane activity seemed like an adventure.

Forgetting, back then, that I still had to eat, to pay rent, that a world existed outside his bedroom door and that there might come a time when once again I had to live in it.

A loss like that would run so deep, language couldn’t touch it. That kind of grief, it changes the shape and color of everything.

A family was a tether, and there was safety in numbers. In larger families, I’d always thought, you were less exposed. It was harder to see the absences, the wounds.

Wishing that I could bend time, so we might meet as children.

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.

Well, I hope you’re being careful, she said. This is only the honeymoon time. You think it’s the real thing, but it’s not.

Once, I’d pictured a life of traveling between foreign cities, black turtlenecks and books and eyeliner and cigarettes, disastrous love affairs I would mine later for material in celebrated autobiographical novels—not this daily, everyday kind of love.