Carly Sachs

the nature of white

She remembers eating in the hotel restaurant on their honeymoon. After dinner they had had coffee—the sugar and cream in such porcelain, the smoothest thing she had ever seen. Tiny pink and purple flowers blooming from the sweet white liquid and the diamond crystals. She licked her index finger and gently let a spoon of sugar fall like snow. How it glistened the way it did outside their window, the backlight of the moon. Everything she wasn't thinking then; the way her life would dissolve and here she was saying how sweet it was, this moment—her life covered in white, the table, the linen, the porcelain, the traces of sugar she had spilled in order to collect a few on the tip of her finger. If only she had collected them all, not let them slip from her skin. This time she thinks of salt, the bitterness you toss over your shoulder for luck, how if both were left in piles on the table, you would not be able to distinguish one from the other. There is a reason that tears taste like salt.