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“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.”
― Madelaine Lucas, Thirst for Salt

“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.”
― Madelaine Lucas, Thirst for Salt

“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.”
― Madelaine Lucas, Thirst for Salt

“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.”
― Madelaine Lucas, Thirst for Salt

“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.”
― Madelaine Lucas, Thirst for Salt

“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.”
― Madelaine Lucas, Thirst for Salt

“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.”
― Madelaine Lucas, Thirst for Salt

“As if it were possible to circumnavigate memory.”
― Madelaine Lucas, Thirst for Salt

“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.”
― Madelaine Lucas, Thirst for Salt

“It was hard to argue with him when he played the card of time--his winning hand, all those years he had over me.”
― Madelaine Lucas, Thirst for Salt

“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.”
― Madelaine Lucas, Thirst for Salt

“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.”
― Madelaine Lucas, Thirst for Salt

“Even when we were not touching we were one, joined by an invisible thread, like Jude had said about the moon and tide.”
― Madelaine Lucas, Thirst for Salt

“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.”
― Madelaine Lucas, Thirst for Salt

“This is what happens when you break with one life to live another–it causes a doubling. Knowing eleven at night here is seven in the morning there. Some part of you is always in conversation with that other self.”
― Madelaine Lucas, Thirst for Salt

“It's just one of those things, my mother said Like trying to explain why bad things happen to good people.

It seemed easy, I said, to understand why the bitter and selfish and cruel might remain loveless. But, strangely, weren't they sometimes the most loved? Those who did not know how to love back. Why did we feel compelled to keep on giving?”
― Madelaine Lucas, Thirst for Salt

“I looked around the cabin--its white walls, the linen curtains that puffed in the breeze like sails, paintings of boats and nautical knots. This place, I knew, would not remember me. Already, most traces of my presence had been swept away and scrubbed clean. But what about Jude? I wanted to stain him, like pollen Wanted to press into his skin, Remember me here.”
― Madelaine Lucas, Thirst for Salt

“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.”
― Madelaine Lucas, Thirst for Salt

“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.”
― Madelaine Lucas, Thirst for Salt

“I knew what it was like to love like that--to want everyone you love to be within sight, within reach.”
― Madelaine Lucas, Thirst for Salt

“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.”
― Madelaine Lucas, Thirst for Salt

“I know how it is, he said, his tone shifting. Voice warm and low. Intimate again. You like it this way. Sneaking around.

And it seemed to me he was offering a way out, and so I shrugged, nodded.

Say nothing more, he said, reaching for me. Saved from having to explain, I kissed him to stop talk, to stop thought.”
― Madelaine Lucas, Thirst for Salt

“Though later I'd decide this was noncommittal, evasive, at the time it struck me as generous, a swelling in my chest, another unfamiliar feeling -- assurance, or security, or trust. we were in this together, we'd figure it out, and that made our love seem durable.”
― Madelaine Lucas, Thirst for Salt

“Or maybe it was because I was in love, and I wanted to create a tangible testament to that, the way people in love always want to document it somehow. What I longed for was a guarantee that if this love ever ended, at least there'd be a record of it, outside of the two of us and our two bodies. Though part of me knew, of course, that it could never work like that--what a burden to put on a child.”
― Madelaine Lucas, Thirst for Salt

“I didn't know how to love like that, in bold gestures. My expressions were small: a folded love note buried in a jacket pocket, a drafted email addressed and sent to no one. Could a quiet love like mine be just as true?”
― Madelaine Lucas, Thirst for Salt

“Later, I would ask Jude what he was doing on the beach that day when he found me all stung up on the shore.
Looking for you, he said.
And why were you looking for me?
The narrative would change, depending on the mood. Somethings it was, Because I wanted to fuck you, his hand sliding up my leg, beneath my dress, reaching for my underwear. I found language like that blunt and crude and yet it thrilled me.
But mostly the answer was, I wanted to talk with you.
And why did you want to talk with me?
Always the beggar for his love. I was like the desperate ocean, wearing away at him. The ceaseless questioning of the tide to the shore that I heard from our bedroom window all winter long. Asking, Do you love me? Do you love me?
And his answer, which never quite satisfied: If I didn't, would I still be here in bed with you?”
― Madelaine Lucas, Thirst for Salt

“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. I wanted to keep it close inside, this feeling, to be turned over and examined only in private, at least until--until what? What was I waiting for, perched on the edge of his bed? Some confirmation that it might be something more. Always wary because I sensed my capacity for loving was bottomless.”
― Madelaine Lucas, Thirst for Salt

“Did you think anything would happen between us?
Never expected you'd be so bold, he said.
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.
But then I remembered all those years between us, a gap wide enough to fall into. Eighteen years--a whole adolescence, a coming of age.
It's really true for me, I insisted. I wish you could fall in love for the first time again. Or that you'd never loved anybody else before me and neither had I.
He laughed and said, Oh, trust me. I was a pretty shitty boyfriend. And anyway, every time is like the first time. That's the beauty of love. It erases.
I didn't know the violence of it then--the erasure.”
― Madelaine Lucas, Thirst for Salt

“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, but still I longed to see him cracked open under my hands in return, while I remained clothed and composed.”
― Madelaine Lucas, Thirst for Salt

“Jude turned to me with a look I didn't recognize.

Can we keep him? he said.

I remember he said it that way--we. For so long I'd felt like a beggar for his love, and now, for the first time, he was asking something of me. To share with him something that would be ours together.”
― Madelaine Lucas, Thirst for Salt