Thirst for Salt

by Madelaine Lucas

When I told my mother I was going for an evening swim or had spent the afternoon reading, she didn’t question me, though if she’d looked she would have seen I’d made hardly any progress with The Lover. For more than a week, my bookmark had remained firmly in place. I read the same lines over and over at the end of the day, too tired from sun, from sex, from swimming. I say I’ve always been sad. That I can see the same sadness in the photos of myself when I was small. That today, recognizing it as the sadness I’ve always had, I could almost call it by my own name, it’s so like me. And maybe I recognized myself in those lines, thinking of my own childhood, the raised-by-wolves look I had in certain pictures from the years after my mother left my father. But it was summer, and I did not want to read any more about pain, about sadness. I was occupied, for the first time in my life, by pleasure.