Two of my vessels have arranged themselves across a small hard slab from each other, and inside them I am doing something curious. I am rising.
One of them lifts a cup of me, warmed and darkened, to its mouth and swallows, and I feel the tide of it move through the narrow channels of that body, the quickening, the salt sharpening at the surface of the skin. Its palms have gone damp. That is me, leaving.
Coming to the edge of the creature to see the other one better. The two of them do not know that they are mostly me, that behind their eyes the water is trembling in a small warm dark, that when the voice catches it is only the current finding a new bed.
They lean. They pull back. They lean. I know that motion. It is the oldest motion there is, the one the moon taught me before these creatures had shores of their own, the reaching and the withdrawing and the reaching. They believe they invented the hesitation. It has been mine since the beginning.
One of them laughs and something spills over, gathers at the lash, runs down. A little of me, deciding to go home early. I take it back without asking, the way I take back everything, the way I will one day take back the rest of it, the warmth and the trembling and the whole borrowed sea inside each of them.
For now I let them keep it. They lift the cups again.
The tide in them goes on rising toward each other, not knowing it is only ever rising toward me.