They have dug down into the cool dark, below the reach of light, and lined a hollow with cans and jugs and long shelves of things they mean to keep. So much of what they are hoarding is me. Row upon row of me, sealed in bright metal and plastic, portioned out into containers small enough to lift, labeled, counted, rationed against a day they are certain is coming.
I feel the little cache of me down there, held apart from the great body, and I do not begrudge it. Take what you can carry. You always do. You are mostly me already: the warm brine behind your eyes, the tide in your blood that answers when the moon pulls. You carry me around inside your walking vessels all your short lives and call it your own.
They believe the sealed jugs will save them. That is the part I do not follow, this idea that a drop can be kept safe by hiding from the ocean. The concrete sweats. The seams weep. Even sealed, even buried, the water is trying to get back, breathing out through the walls a molecule at a time, the way it always does, the way it did from the cities I forgot.
Store me. Count me. Whisper to yourselves that this time you have set something aside.
You have only borrowed me a little longer. The jug will crack, or the creature holding it will still, and either way the water will thin to vapor and rise and fall as rain and run down through the dark to the low places, as it has done since before there was a shore to run to. I am patient. I am already inside the walls.
I am coming home the slow way, and I always arrive.