Thirst for Salt

by Madelaine Lucas

I thought of how jealous I’d been all those months ago. I recalled it almost fondly—that insecurity of early love. It gains a sweetness once love has aged and deepened.

With winter came a new tenderness between us. Gentle with each other. And I took this as a deepening, not a waning, of passion. This is real love, I told myself. It wasn’t the stuff of the summer. It was reading in bed, falling asleep with the light on.

Crying dreams, sometimes, where he told me there was another woman. Or worse—he just didn’t love me anymore, and no words of mine could bring him back.

Do you love me? Do you love me? I asked, shaking him awake in the dark. His rotation of answers: You know I do. Don’t make me say it all the time or it will lose its meaning. If I didn’t, would I still be here, in bed with you?

Love, I’d read, was supposed to be a light and weightless feeling, but I had always longed for gravity.

Or maybe it was because I was in love, and I wanted to create a tangible testament to that, the way people in love always want to document it somehow. What I longed for was a guarantee that if this love ever ended, at least there’d be a record of it, outside of the two of us and our two bodies.

It’s so easy for a man to think of a woman as a trap, Maeve said then.

You two always seemed like you’d just finished fucking or were just about to, and I hated you for that. How obnoxious we must have seemed back then, parading our early love.

I cry when someone’s rude to me, I cry when they’re nice. I’m a fucking mess.

I sat myself down on his lap, looped my arms around his neck, kissed him in the place below his ear that made him shiver. As if to say, Mine. The coat might suit you better, but it still belongs to me.

Might do us some good, anyway, hey? Give us a chance to miss each other again. I do miss you, I thought, though he was right there with me, standing in the morning light, and I was holding him.

So, what was it, then? Drinking, or other women? In my experience, it tends to be one or the other. Or both.

Whenever I’ve been in love with someone, really in love, I’ve never been able to keep away from them. You should have seen your father and me in the early days. Wearing each other’s clothes, following each other from room to room. It was like one long conversation, those first few years.

I’m not sure for how long, for time in the absence of someone you love cannot be measured in the same way as regular time.

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.

But I needed guidance, I told him, structure. In many ways, my life as a student was the most stable one I’d known, and over the years I would often feel the urge to return to it, whenever I was between jobs or between lives, feeling lost and purposeless.

Oldest song I knew, the one I’d heard as a child when I was looking for my father in shells and in the bath when I held my head under.

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.

But that summer the blood would come, and I would stay stranded on the shore, watching the other children swim because my body was a wound, I was a woman now.

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

With the pressure you put on things, love, Jude said, they’ll never last.

Was this intimacy too? Strained and cautious. Slowly building back up all the barriers we’d broken through. Falling in love in reverse.

In all our time together, I never once saw him cry. Saw his face go pale, ashen, eyes redden but never brim. His heart was a dry country.

So that’s it? I said. You’re just going to let me leave? I wanted smashed plates, doors slamming. To stand back and see the damage we’d done. I wanted to dig my nails into his skin. I want you to be happy, he said.

All his rules for butterflies and birds. He treated me like a light thing. Loving things loosely and then letting them go.

You don’t have to do this, he said, but he had a box of my clothes in his arms, and continued to load them carefully into the car.

But it’s grief, really, that is love’s twin, that knows no bounds of time or space. Wave after wave it keeps coming, whereas hatred cools, fades.

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

We couldn’t stay anymore in that little white house, where the three of us had lived, because what good is a home once the ones you love have left it?

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.

Women are born with all their eggs in their ovaries, like the seeds of a fruit. I’d been with my mother since she’d been in my grandmother’s womb, and now I was sleeping in her bed and my mother was in the next room sleeping in her mother’s. It made me think of us like Russian dolls. Women carried inside women carried inside women.

I’m friendly with all my exes. This was a point of pride for him, but I didn’t see how I could sit beside him and forget what we had known, when we had been so naked with each other, and I felt the strain of it that afternoon. Angling away from each other, new distance between our bodies. Apologizing if his elbow touched mine or my foot brushed against his leg.

As all lovers learn, when love ends, you lose the future as well as the past.

All my life, I’d pictured my grandmother as some distant gothic figure, but her blood was mine.

Still, it was hard at first not to see that monthly blood and think of loss. Cycles of loss and letting go. My body like an hourglass, moving time in blood instead of sand.

The rituals of scholarship allowed me to be the way I was—quiet, solitary. Not that I didn’t go out with the girls in my cohort at first, get drunk and fall down in the street, skinning my knees to two bloody bulbs. Not that I didn’t kiss strangers.

Days and then months and eventually years would pass without a thought of him, and then I would surprise myself by waking up sobbing from a dream that he had died and no one had thought to tell me. This is when it began, my habit of tracking him.

Sharkbait, he’d called me, and after all these years he is still circling.

A MAN STRIKES A MATCH and starts a fire in the house of love. A woman takes a pill to make herself bleed. Or maybe it’s gin and horses, or a plane ticket to a place that makes you think of summer, where every day might be a holiday—at least from the life that you’ve been living.

What continues to surprise me, and what I still don’t understand, is not the reasons that love ends but the way that it endures.

It never really goes away, the longing for the life not lived, because isn’t that part of how we come to know ourselves too? Through what we lack as much as what we have, all we dream but do not hold. Some desires have no resolution.

There’s no shame in coming home—how many times has my mother said that to me over the years?

I thought that if no place could ever house everyone I loved, whatever home I hoped to make could only be shaped by absence. 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.

We lose sight of each other briefly, when the brush grows thick or the path winds round a bend, and then we find each other again.