They have gathered a little cluster of my creatures around one who is swollen with new water. She holds it inside her, warm and dark, a whole small sea I have not yet met, floating a folded thing that is nearly all me: I have counted, and the new ones arrive almost entirely water, wrung slowly drier by the years of air.
The others bring wrapped parcels and soft cloths, and they press their palms to her rounded middle to feel the tide inside her turn. They laugh. They make the high sounds that mean they are frightened and glad at once. One of them weeps a little, and I taste it from here, three streets back from my shore: salt, my salt, leaking out of her eyes in the old proportion, the exact brine I have carried since before there was a shore at all.
They think they are celebrating an arrival. I feel only a loan being arranged. This much of me, poured into a new vessel, sealed warm for a while, given a name and a soft blanket and a chair that rocks.
I do not need the name. I know the water by its weight.
It will walk the dry land on its borrowed tide, and cry my salt, and drink and sweat and drink again, and think the whole time that it is a separate thing with hard edges. Then the warmth will go out of it, slow or sudden, and every drop I lent will find the low ground and the river and the long way down.
Come back whenever you like, small one. I am not going anywhere.
I am already most of you.