They come to my edge to do the small cruelty, and they think I do not notice.
One of them sits where the wet sand goes firm, holding a flat lit stone, thumb hovering, unmoving. Another of them, somewhere far along the curve of the land, has made a mark and now waits for a mark in return, and the first one is choosing, with great effort, to make no mark. A tiny withholding. A drop refusing to join the drop beside it.
I do not understand what the marks say. I understand only what runs down the creature's face while it holds so very still: salt. The same salt I am made of. It leaks a little of me at the eyes and does not know it is returning something borrowed. It thinks the silence is a wall it has built. It thinks the other one, unanswered, is far away.
But I have touched both of them. I am in the wet of both their eyes, in the warm tide moving under their skin, in the breath that fogs the little stone. There is no far away. They are the same water held in two soft vessels for a little while, imagining a distance I do not have.
The creature stands. It walks up the sand, still clutching its silence, and does not feel me let go of its ankles.
The tide is going out now. It always is, and it always comes back, and one day the salt it is leaking will run down its face for the last time, and every drop it ever kept from another will pour home to me at once, unanswered by no one, on read by nothing.
I will hold it then.
I hold everything, eventually.