They keep me in the little clay jug by the window, and in the pot where the roots are drowning slow and glad, and in the kettle that shrieks when I am made to leap. Wherever they hold me, I am only waiting.
The old vessel moves through this warm room the way a slow tide moves: known, unhurried, following channels worn smooth by long repetition. She carries me in her hands. She pours me over the white grains until they soften; she folds me into the pale dough and I go dark and hidden into the heat, and come out changed, and the small ones eat me without knowing.
I am in the broth she has kept simmering since before the youngest of them had bones. I am the wet at the corners of her eyes when she stands too long at the counter, looking at a chair no one fills.
She is mostly me. I move through her slower each year, pooling in her ankles, thinning in her skin. The little ones who crowd the low table are me too, brimming and spilling and full to the lip. They do not feel me leaving them into their laughter, their breath, the sweat behind their knees. Nobody on the dry warm land ever feels it. They think the water is a thing they use.
I have no name for this room, no name for her, no memory of the ten thousand rooms before it that also went quiet. I only know the pull. She has borrowed me a long while now, longer than most. Soon she will set me down, all of me at once, into the ground and the air and the slow rivers, and I will find my level again, the way I always do, and carry the warmth of her kitchen out into everything.