Thirst for Salt

by Madelaine Lucas

At a certain time down south, sea and sky seem to merge, to kiss. Mirroring each other, like lovers do. Above and below, one expanse of silver blue. I’d never known that kind of love—where all boundaries disappeared.

every time is like the first time. That’s the beauty of love. Love erases.

There are no second chances, the only do-overs you get are with someone new.

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.

They’ll be afraid if you’re afraid, he said. But if you trust them, they’ll trust you.

Or maybe it just was, right from the start. 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.

We’re not defined by touch, I thought. It’s absence that contours the body, changes the shape of it,

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

I was surprised by the realization that even if he was not reliable in the way that I’d imagined, I did not desire him any less. I could see for the first time how it might feel good to make mistakes with someone, sway together, embrace the drift. And maybe I sensed it, wanted it then. The ways we might either break each other in or burn each other up.

The thing about sharks, he’d said, is that at heart they’re ambivalent. Put yourself in their way and they’ll bite, but it’s not about hunger, or need. What we might be tempted to call fate is really just a matter of convenience.

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,

thought we should be like a gift to each other, but I longed to be essential.

Love, we say, and expect the word to hold so many things.

Unrequited love is still love, he said. But it’s never a great love. Can’t be. It’s one-sided.

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.

I think we tend to double down over time, become more stubbornly ourselves.

You’re not very forgiving of the people you love, you know that? My little girl with her heart of leather. Who taught you to be so tough?

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.

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.

How could I have been a mother when I was still my mother’s daughter? It was fundamental to who I was. I had always understood myself in relation to her.

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.