Thirst for Salt

by Madelaine Lucas

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.

I’ve never done anything like that before, I said. Nothing like this has ever happened to me.

Me neither, he said, and it felt like a victory—to give him something new.

What I wanted to know from my mother was how to reconcile the fact that some people never find love. I am sure I said it that way, find, like a miraculous, unintentional discovery, as if love were a stone in the sand. But to be found also implies that something lost has been returned to its place of belonging, and what did I know about love and stones? I was still holding out for a kind of love that felt like homecoming.

I searched his palms, trying to tell our future, but they only told stories about his past.

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.

Our afternoons were stolen time, precious to me, and I maintained my old superstition that if I spoke about what I loved, it would somehow be taken from me.

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.

Watching him that night, I’d been reminded of my father—the way he had always been quick to pull a coin from behind my ear when I was a child, and just as quick to disappear.

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.

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.

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. Metaphors are lies, one of my professors had said in a lecture during my first year of university. How then, I might argue with her now, in the absence of figurative language, are we supposed to talk about love? Love, we say, and expect the word to hold so many things.

I wanted to believe, back then, that we’d grow old together—or rather that I’d grow old and he’d grow older, for there was no way to bridge that gap in time. But maybe we could hope for a sanding down of those rough edges, the way time wears away at all of us, until we reached a state of greater equilibrium.

Love, I’d read, was supposed to be a light and weightless feeling, but I had always longed for gravity.

How could I have been a mother when I was still my mother’s daughter?