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?

It’s late, but my body keeps New York time. This is what happens when you break with one life to live another—it causes a doubling. Knowing eleven at night here is seven in the morning there. Some part of you is always in conversation with that other self.

You tend to your loneliness like a garden,

With such abandon, I thought. The tide goes on, throwing itself again and again at the shore.

Trusting his arms would be there to pull me up if it got too rough. Those three seconds of tumult, tossed upside down and under, before he yanked me out, calling me his little fish on the line, and held me coughing against his chest. Salt-stung and rashed by sand, but saved. I would never be that young again.

because I did not wish to eclipse my mother, even if it was, as she said, only natural. There was a sadness in this, that was perhaps the sadness of all grown daughters, for it forced me to admit that she was growing older too, and I did not want to reckon with the vulnerability that would come with her aging.

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.

And anyway, every time is like the first time. That’s the beauty of love. Love erases. I didn’t know the violence of it then—that erasure. I liked the idea of Jude made into a clean slate for me, my touch negating all others’, so sure then I would be the one, the last, to make an indelible mark. I wanted so badly for it to be true. That we might be like two virgins.

It seemed easy, I said, to understand why the bitter and selfish and cruel might remain loveless. But, strangely, weren’t they sometimes the most loved? Those who did not know how to love back. Why did we feel compelled to keep on giving?

Although maybe this, too, was the natural way of things. From child to mother to child again.

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.

If Jude was a house, I sensed that he held many hidden rooms. He had turned the light on in only one of them, and he’d made me feel so welcome, so warm, that I’d forgotten about all those other places left in the dark.

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

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

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.

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.

I felt like we’d promised to tell each other a secret and after I’d revealed mine, he’d changed his mind.

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.

Jude thought we should be like a gift to each other, but I longed to be essential. That was love, I decided, as our intimacy changed and deepened over the course of the year. Not being able to do without. Wanting—that was just desire, fluid and changeable as the tide. Need was real love, the truest kind I’d known, born as it is out of what we lack, and that was how I felt about Jude back then—that he completed me, we completed each other, as in the old myth about the origin of love. And if I was essential, the other half of whatever he was, then he could never abandon me.

In that moment, I felt so lucky I thought I might die. The only way I can understand this now is that what I was feeling, standing in his kitchen all those years ago, was a presentiment of loss.

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

They couldn’t know then how much things would continue to change in the coming months. Neither could I. That we should have held on to the sweetness of those days, the three of us, making coffee, talking, idling away hours because we had nowhere to be. We were home.

you’d follow me into dreams, he said, and I hated that he saw me that way, as someone always trailing behind, like a little sister, where I wanted us to be equals—

What else could I say? 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.

I think now that this is something that happens in small families—roles get confused, relationships do double duty. So a daughter might play the part of an overprotective parent, or a mother might rely on the daughter like a partner. Mother as runaway child, daughter as mother, daughter as husband.

And while intellectually I knew that both things could be true—that the love and regret did not necessarily cancel each other out—it was difficult for me to contemplate because a function of that love meant wanting me to make different choices, and might this not also imply that she considered them mistakes?

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? I thought to myself, You did.

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.

I was trying to hold myself back for him, my brother, as if I could wait for him to catch up, hold out for a second childhood.

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

IN THE MOVIES, ALL GOOD DOGS RETURN HOME-A HOPEFUL idea, that the things we love are never truly lost and can be returned to us, or find their own way back.

it wasn’t that I had lost them, I thought. They’d never belonged to me at all.

Why can’t you just love me? Isn’t that enough? When you’re like this, he said, you make yourself real hard to love.

I hadn’t learned how to contain myself, to be easy, gentle, to hold on to anything without breaking it. With the pressure you put on things, love, Jude said, they’ll never last.

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? What good is a home that has failed to keep them all safe, contained, within reach?

I would always be my mother’s daughter, I thought. How could I have been a mother when I was still my mother’s daughter?

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

It looked, he’d said, like hell. Not an empty underground of devils and brimstone but a place where everything you love is burning. A place you used to recognize, and call home.

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.

I loved him in a way that was part sister and part mother and this has never really settled,

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.