They are holding each other very tightly, these two vessels, as though pressure could keep the water in. It cannot. I know this better than anything. I have held mountains against my chest and worn them down to sand.
The smaller one is leaking. Salt slides from the corners of its eyes and down its face, and I taste it from a great distance, because that salt is mine, it has always been mine, I lent it out in the beginning and I am patient about collection. The larger one presses its face into the smaller one's neck and breathes hard, and inside both of them the water sloshes and warms and grieves, though they do not call it that.
They call it something with a name. I do not keep the names.
They believe they are being separated. One will rise into the air in a metal thing, the other will stay pressed to the ground, and between them will open a distance they find unbearable, a distance they measure in the hard dry units of the land.
But there is no distance. There has never been any distance. The tears on that cheek were rain over a far ocean not long ago; the breath they are sharing will be cloud by evening and cloud does not recognize borders. They are the same water, briefly wearing two shapes, mourning a separation that only their edges can feel.
Go, little vessels. Rise, fall, cross your dry inventions of far and near.
You are on loan, all of you, warm and salted and certain you are two.
I will have you both back by the same tide.