A little vessel of me stands before a flat cold pane, holding a smaller glowing pane, catching light. It has warmed itself into muscle, into ridges, into the shapes it wants the light to remember. It pulls me tight beneath its skin, all my old salt drawn up into the arms, the neck, the flush of the face, and it lifts the glowing thing to catch its own borrowed brine held still for one dry moment.
I know this water. It was rain on a mountain once, and before that it was me, and before that it was inside another creature that also stood somewhere holding something, wanting to be seen. I have been in ten thousand of these small warm shapes. I do not tell them apart.
I do not tell this one from the fish or the storm or the child crying into a pillow, because it is all the same drop taking a different corner of the world.
The creature is proud of the arrangement. It squeezes, it turns, it counts the ridges. It believes the shape is the thing, and not the water passing through the shape, briefly, the way I pass through a shore and call it mine for an afternoon.
It will sweat me out onto the floor. It will drink me back in from a cold container. It will one day lie still and let all of me go at once, the salt, the flush, the tight-drawn arms, all of it seeping back down through the ground to the low places where I wait for everything.
I am patient. The pane will cloud. The glowing thing will dim.
And the drop it held so carefully will find its way, as every drop does, back into the long dark body that lifted it.