Thirst for Salt

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 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.

What continues to surprise me, and what I still don't understand, is not the reason that love ends but the way that it endures.

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 wall, to cut that invisible thread.

We are taught that love is not so different from hatred, that instead of opposites, the two extremes of the human heart might in fact be twins. But it's grief, really, that is love's twin, that knows no bounds of time or space. Wave after wave it keeps coming, whereas hatred cools, fades. So many times I swore that I loved Jude, that no one had ever loved or been loved this way before, and then something broke through, a new depth. Colder and darker moved the waters of my love. Thinking, in those first few days after, of something [my mother] once sad: There is no end to grief, because there is no end to love.

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.

We can never really know how we are perceived by others--especially those who come, in time, to love us, those initial impressions overlaid with the knowledge of later intimacies.

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

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 be like the saddest thing.

I hated the way they spoke like that. As if there could be no measurement of their past in years. As if I, so young, couldn't possibly understand the way time worked, and what it did to people.

It was hard to argue with him when he played the card of time--his winning hand, all those years he had over me.

Looking back, it seems that was how Jude always was with me: keeping his distance, never asking for anything I might not want to give. That steadiness that I took to be a strength--his consistency--I realize now was a kind of boundary, a way of drawing a line in the sand. Like a sprinkling of salt at the threshold, it was a kind of spell to keep himself safe, unchanged. What he needed more than anything was to believe he needed nothing, that if I should ever leave, he'd remain the same man. But I had his key in my coat pocket and I was happy then, because it seemed like he was letting me in.

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.

Even when we were not touching we were one, joined by an invisible thread, like Jude had said about the moon and tide.

Love, I still believe, exists outside of time. Or it is its own time. It makes its own measures--not in minutes or hours or calendar days but in something closer to seasons, or tidal movements.

All those years later, I recognized what I had always known--that my parents had loved each other. How much easier, I've often thought, to understand their separation if they hadn't. Love could endure more than I had allowed for, I realized. Some things last a long time, and maybe there's hope in that.

What I remember is that one morning, she was gone. I'm not sure for how long, for time in the absence of someone you love cannot be measured in the same way as regular time.

Do you love me? Do you love me? I asked, shaking him awake in the dark. His rotation of answers: You know I do. Don't make me say it all the time or it will lose its meaning. If I didn't, would I still be here, in bed with you? I needed to hear it, the reassurance of those words. Repeating it to him over and over that winter, IloveyouIloveyouIloveyou, like a prayer. Sometimes I would keep myself awake after Jude had fallen asleep to look at his face, missing him even in sleep. So sure, in these moments, that if he ever tried to leave me, I wouldn't let him. Undignified, the scene I'd make. Not too proud to beg. I wanted us to be like rocks or anchors, keeping each other in place. Love, I'd read, was supposed to be a light and weightless feeling, but I had always longed for gravity.

The way he looked at me sometimes, on waking: as if I were a surprise, a gift, my appearance in his life miraculous. He called me Love, as if it were my name. As if I could be the very thing itself.

You're just different from the other boys I've brought home. Different in what way? Well, you're not exactly a boy. I'm old, you mean? No, not old. But you're, you know, a man. I hate that there've been others, said Jude, and I was so surprised at the fact of his jealousy that I apologized. Why would he be jealous, I thought, when I had never loved or been loved this way before? It wasn't like this, I said. It wasn't ever like this. Tell me that you've never had anyone else. I want you to pretend. Okay, I said, laughing. I've never been with anyone else. Happy? Tell me I'm your first, he said, his voice low and his hands moving across my blouse. Tell me that you've never been touched. I'm untouched. Chaste, a clean slate. But you want it.

As if it were possible to circumnavigate memory.

It was not that I lacked those kinds of desires, but I was afraid that if I acted on them, they would undo me. In a world without boundaries, I could lose myself.

Desire, I was only beginning to understand that day at the ruins, comes in many forms, and some of them are violent. We learn this in the stories we are told about love. Struck by an angel's arrow or drugged by a love flower, desire wounds, and I had felt its blue sting. The thought of him all day, like pushing on a bruise.

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.

Although we can never really know how we are perceived by others—especially those who come, in time, to love us, those initial impressions overlaid with the knowledge of later intimacies—

I was looking out at the horizon. At a certain time down south, sea and sky seem to merge, to kiss. Mirroring each other, like lovers do. Above and below, one expanse of silver blue. I’d never known that kind of love—where all boundaries disappeared.

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

What we might be tempted to call fate is really just a matter of convenience.

That’s the beauty of love. Love erases.

Thinking, in those first few days in the mountains after I moved back in with my mother, of something she’d once said: There is no end to grief, because there is no end to love.