Thirst for Salt

by Madelaine Lucas

Such a long time since I’d seen or heard from him, though sometimes, lonely and between lovers, I looked him up online.

How could I not be hung up on the past, I wanted to say to my mother, when so many things I’d loved had been left behind there?

Well, he said, see you around, Sharkbait. Try not to get eaten alive.

the pain subsiding, making way for something new.

Always the beggar for his love. I was like the desperate ocean, wearing away at him.

But no father can protect his daughters from growing up and becoming the kinds of women who are bold enough to enter the houses of strange and solitary men. There is nothing that can protect them from the high wild loneliness of such a life or the desires that come with it. What you might do for a way out.

was learning his routines, trying to carve out a space for myself to fit in.

What I wanted was to be asked to stay.

I don’t need you to be here, Jude would tell me in time, but I want you to be.

Love, he would tell me, is all about choice. Free will. Need ...

Jude thought we should be like a gift to each other, but I lon...

loved best in gestures, in metaphors, and I wanted to build a life out of what I loved.

And although I’d never been in a serious relationship, I felt like I knew how to do this too. Yes, I nodded. I’d been waiting my whole life to love and be loved like that.

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

treat ’em mean, keep ’em keen kind of woman.

Another way of brushing hands with a life that might have been mine, through this temporary mothering.

THERE MUST BE PEOPLE out there who are not drawn to the shadow of what could have been, who feel no pull toward the other lives they could be living, but I certainly have never been one of them.

Method of contraception. Trust, I wanted to say.

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.

would surprise myself by waking up sobbing from a dream that he had died and no one had thought to tell me. This is when it began, my habit of tracking him. In this way my love for him mirrored my mother’s love for my father, which, despite their separation, had endured—call it habit, call it time, call it memory, the memory of love.

It’s not so easy, after all, to cut that invisible thread.

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.