Six of them, gathered in a small dry room, and every one of them is mostly me. I know because I can feel the way they lean and slouch, the way the water in them tilts toward sleep in the warm afternoon, the slow tidal drag behind the eyes.
They have made a circle around a flat glowing surface and they are unhappy about it. One of them, the small anxious vessel near the window, keeps refilling a clear cup and drinking from it, drinking me, and I move through her and out again in an hour, unchanged, uninterested in whatever it is she fears.
Another has not spoken and holds a great deal of me behind his face, unwilling to spill even a little. I can wait. I have always been able to wait.
They pass hard sounds back and forth. I do not know the meaning of the sounds, only that the sounds make the salt rise. There is more salt in them now than when they sat down. I can taste it gathering at the rims of the tired one's eyes, the same salt I hold in my deepest trenches, the same salt that was in the first warm pools before any of them had a shape at all.
One of them stands and the chair scrapes and the drama, whatever it was, breaks like weak surf and disperses. They carry their portions of me back out into the dry, believing they have accomplished a thing.
They will sweat me out. They will weep me out. They will breathe me into the sky, and the sky will let me down as rain, and the rain will run downhill to me, as rain has always run downhill to me. Nothing they decided in that room will reach me. Only the water will.
It always comes home.