Thirst for Salt

by Madelaine Lucas

Thick-dark night beyond, a blue so deep you could drown in it, and lit up, brilliantly, by the moon.

My mouth on his mouth, searching. Thinking, This could be the last time. Leaning across the gear stick into his lap. Remembering the afternoon last summer when he came to get me on a whim, and we drove from my rented room in the city back to the Old House, itching to touch. Prickle of sweat on the back of my neck, thighs sticking to the leather seat beneath my dress. We took the long way back, along the old highway, past the rolling hills and apple orchards, and parked the truck along a quiet stretch of the Hume, making love with the windows down and the radio tuned to an old country station, smell of bushfire in the air—backburning season. This is not real, I’d thought back then. He is a dream and I have dreamed him. It was a strange feeling, stepping into the life I’d always wanted and imagined for myself, like I’d cheated somehow. It was love the way love should be—a story I was telling myself and roping him in. A thread I tied around the two of us, binding him to me.

I was superstitious in those early days up north. Counting and recounting the days of the month on my fingers. Lying on my mother’s couch reading Play It as It Lays with the curtains drawn against the heat, dressing all in white, like Maria.

It would also be true to say that I never learned how to make a clean break.

Do you still love Jude? I think a part of me always will. It always feels that way at first, she said. But it will stop. I promise. And I didn’t know then if that was better, if I even wanted it to. At the time, that seemed to me like the saddest thing.

I’d have a daughter, I was sure. Women are born with all their eggs in their ovaries, like the seeds of a fruit. I’d been with my mother since she’d been in my grandmother’s womb, and now I was sleeping in her bed and my mother was in the next room sleeping in her mother’s. It made me think of us like Russian dolls. Women carried inside women carried inside women.

It’s only been three weeks, I said. You can’t be alone for even three weeks?

These days, the ache for a baby is like a bruise. It hurts, that kind of longing. It is the truest form of unrequited love, the most pure, because the object of desire is only imaginary, not yet born.

Although, as my mother and I both discovered, it’s not so easy to forget, to leave the past behind. It follows after, like a loose hem or a wake in water. You drag it with you when you go.

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.