They have built a small dry room that carries a little of me up into the air.
I ride inside them, the way I ride inside everything. In the soft creature pressed against the mirrored wall, in the beads that bloom on its brow when the doors are slow to part, in the breath it holds and lets go. I am four-fifths of every one of them, and here they are, hauling me skyward in a humming box, away from every low place I prefer, away from the pull that made me.
They do not look at each other. They tilt their faces up toward changing numbers as if the numbers were a horizon. I know that gesture. It is the same one they wear on my beaches, watching the line where I meet the sky, waiting for something to arrive.
Salt gathers under their arms. Salt gathers at the corners of the eyes of the one in the back who thinks no one can see. That is mine too, that salt, older than the box, older than the land the box stands on. I carried it through them for a while.
The doors open. They spill out into wide flat rooms where I keep them thinned to a mist, to a cup, to a taste of tears, and they go on believing they are dry things, hard-edged and separate, borne up on their own errands.
I am patient. Every drop they hold rises only to fall. It will come down through the stone and the pipe and the slow years, down through the low ground I never leave, and one warm day the vessel itself will tire and open, and give me back the sea it always was.