A small warm cup of me is lifted to a mouth every morning, and I go willingly, because I was always going to go.
They think they have made something new. They have taken me from where I gathered, sent me up as breath, dropped me again as their sky-water, run me through pipes and dark ground and a machine that shakes with heat, poured me over the burnt seeds they love, and now I sit in a rounded clay hollow, steaming, darkened, held between two hands that are themselves mostly me.
The creature wraps its fingers around the warmth as though it were something rare. As though warmth belonged to it.
I know these hands. I have been in them before, in colder forms, in older bodies. I will be in them again.
It drinks. And now I am inside, moving through the small salt channels I have moved through in every creature that ever crawled up out of me onto the drying land. For a few hours I am the wet in its eyes, the ache behind its slow thoughts, the tremor it calls being awake. It carries me around its little rooms and believes the day is its own.
Then it gives me back. Always it gives me back. Through breath, through skin, through the long return down every gutter and river and root, and I gather again where I have always gathered, and rise again, and fall.
The cup goes cold on the table, holding the last mouthful. Even that is only waiting.
Even that is only mine, on loan, on its slow way home.