Thirst for Salt

by Madelaine Lucas

I’d never known that kind of love—where all boundaries disappeared. Her observation had troubled me.

And though I did not give myself up easily, was guarded and slow to trust, I was also painfully earnest. My young face had an openness that tended to reveal too much, and this, I knew, could be strangely intimidating in the way vulnerability sometimes is. I was not casual, especially with men, raised as I was in a world of women—

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. And yet, we were both adults, and I felt for the first time deserving of a love that was not my mother’s.

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.

It’s just one of those things, my mother said. Like trying to explain why bad things happen to good people. 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?

He belonged to the whole town, and so it belonged to him.

Eleven, I corrected him, because every year separating me from my childhood counted.

With Jude, I was visible in a way I never had been before. I didn’t feel shame around this but I sensed or feared that he did, and so I teased. Quick to make those jokes before anyone else could.

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

What I wanted was to be asked to stay.

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

But my fear, and my patience, wore away as it got later. There was nothing special about this, I thought. I was just another woman waiting for a man to come home. I hated him then for putting me in that position, which seemed deeply embarrassing.

You want a dog, not a man, he said to me on another occasion, when I was angry at him for coming home late or not answering his phone.

To behave badly and be reprimanded in order to be for-given—somewhere along the course of his life, Jude had learned this as a kind of love.

I loved without reservation once I did, and in this way I was stronger than him.

He chose us. Or we chose each other. Or maybe it wasn’t even a choice at all. Like love.

I think that on some level it embarrassed me—that I wanted what women have always been supposed to want.

I recognized what I had always known—that my parents had loved each other. How much easier, I’ve often thought, to understand their separation if they hadn’t.

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