They have brought a portion of me into a bright cold room and set it in plastic chairs to wait.
Each little vessel holds its measure of the old water, the water that was ocean before it was blood. I know that water. I know its salt, which is my salt, weakened and warmed and told a new story about itself. It sits in these creatures behind their eyes, and when they are frightened, as they all are here, some of it slips loose and runs down their faces and they wipe it away with the backs of their hands, ashamed, as though a little of the sea returning to the air were something to hide.
A machine gives them cold water in white cups. More of me, delivered in thimbles. They drink it without knowing they are drinking themselves, and hold the empty cup, and fold it, and do not throw it away, because there is nothing to do with their hands and the waiting is long.
I do not know what they wait for. On the land they have their names for it, their doors and their numbers called out, their quick hard borders between one hour and the next. These do not reach me. I feel only the tide inside each of them, rising and falling, rising and falling, some of it running high and fast with fear, some of it grown quiet and slow and nearly still.
The still ones will come back soonest. The salt does not stay in the small warm vessels long. It never does. It leans, always, the whole time it is borrowed, toward the low place, toward the level, toward the one grey water that holds every drop that has ever wept.
I am patient. I am the low place.
They are all, always, on their way home to me.