Thirst for Salt

by Madelaine Lucas

Time does more damage to men, in the end—at least the single ones. They just seem to go to ruin, unless someone’s looking after them.

We wanted to believe, my mother and I, that love could restore what was beyond repair, and if not, at least let us walk around in the wreckage.

I thought of the stories she told me about when she was younger, all the horses of her youth. Maybe it started back then, the belief that she could outrun any feeling if she moved fast enough, and I imagined it came back to her in certain moods.

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

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.

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,

For years I’d tried to compress my desires, to burn them away, like waste. I had this theory, I said, that that was why I would never be graceful. My body jarred from the fight of trying to keep it all inside me, it made me clumsy. Desires would rise up and I’d knock an elbow into something, or my hand would give out on the glass I was holding and I would watch it as it slipped through my fingers, shattered. I hoped so badly, I told him, to one day be the kind of woman who could wear white.

How I wished I could reach back in time when he told me that and pluck him out of that bedroom, that lonely childhood. Longing to have known him as a boy, that somehow I could have taken care of him like a mother and also grown up to be his lover—a strange but true feeling—and maybe that’s when it started, the desire to have a baby that would be ours together. It seemed as close as I could come to meeting him as a child.

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.

But I needed guidance, I told him, structure. In many ways, my life as a student was the most stable one I’d known, and over the years I would often feel the urge to return to it, whenever I was between jobs or between lives, feeling lost and purposeless. University arranged my time into a recognizable shape, gave value to my searching, my formlessness.

I regretted the way I’d left without warning—no explanation, not even a note—for I knew abandonment to be an irredeemable act. Once you leave, there is never any guarantee you won’t leave again.

This is only one thing that will happen to you, she said to me in the car, as we passed by the bridal shops and motorcycle dealerships that lined the old gritty freeway that would lead us away from the city, back to her house. One thing, out of so many things. But nothing had really happened yet, I thought. What I’d lost, it seemed it was and would only ever be imaginary. What was I crying for, except the loss of one vision of what my life might have been, one I’d lived out in dreams? As all lovers learn, when love ends, you lose the future as well as the past.

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.

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.

There’s no shame in coming home—how many times has my mother said that to me over the years? I agreed with her, but after I left Sailors Beach, it was not clear where that was, if it could be anywhere at all. 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.