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?

For so long I have lived like the woman in the parable, looking back to see whatever ruins lay behind me.

As sleep dragged me back again, I felt the heat press against me like a second skin, heard the ocean outside my window like a lover’s breath. Everything suddenly unbearably erotic, alive.

Some fire had worked its way through my bloodstream, that was all. It could have been the venom. It could have been desire. The fierce blue sting of it.

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.

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.

I loved best in gestures, in metaphors, and I wanted to build a life out of what I loved.

Jude took the knife from my hand, sucked the blood, and that was love: mouthfuls of juice and blood and spit, sweet and metallic.

We lived in each other’s pockets then, as if we were joined by an invisible thread, the way Jude had said the moon was bound to the tide. Trailing his wet fingers across my collarbones while I sat beside the bath reading, reciting certain passages out loud, King’s head resting on my knees.

Back then, I often confused danger with beauty, drawn as I was to stories of other people’s tragedies, tales of lighthouse keepers’ daughters, lonely men and women living out on the edge, perched above those same wrecking waters.

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. Three days, two weeks, a month or more—what difference does it make? It is all interminable.

WE ARE TAUGHT THAT LOVE IS NOT SO DIFFERENT FROM hatred, that instead of opposites, the two extremes of the human heart might in fact be twins. 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.