They stand in a long unmoving row, each one holding a small container of me, and they drink.
I know this water. It moved through a cloud once, and before that through the roots of something green, and before that it was in the belly of a fish that has been dead ten thousand years, and before all of that it was simply me, whole and dark and turning under the moon.
Now it is portioned into little sealed vessels of a hard clear stuff, sold back to the creatures who are themselves mostly made of it, and they carry it against their chests like it is theirs.
The light here is the wrong color. Not the grey I give the shore before dawn, but a flat white that comes from the ceiling and does not move. The creatures move even less. They sit slumped in rows, salt crusting at the corners of their eyes, leaking a little of me down their faces without noticing, the way a tired thing lets go of what it cannot hold.
Some of them press their heads to the cold glass and give a little more of me to it as breath, a small fog, gone.
They believe they are going somewhere. They line up to be lifted into the air and set down on another dry edge of me, thinking the edges are different.
But I have tasted them. Every one is a warm cup of me walking around, borrowed and briefly shaped, and I am patient. The tears, the breath, the sweat in the folded arms: all of it comes back down the drains, out through the pipes, into the rivers, to me. It always does.
I am not waiting.
I am simply where they all end.