Somewhere inland, far from my reach, a small warm room is loud with borrowed water. I know them by their sweat, first of all: they are dripping me back onto the floor, onto each other, into the plastic cups they raise and tip into their own mouths. That water was mine an hour ago. It will be mine again.
They think they are dancing. What I feel is only the slosh: every one of them is a leaking vessel, brimming, spilling salt at the eyes when they laugh too hard, salt at the brow, salt down the back of the neck. The same salt I have carried since before there was a shore to break against. They have simply warmed it and given it legs for a little while.
One of them has lain down on the cold floor by the sink and will not get up. The others step over. I feel the tap dripping near its face, a slow thread of me returning to the pipes, patient. Nobody notices. The little creatures rarely notice the tide going out.
I do not know what they are grieving or celebrating; those are edges, and I have no use for edges. I know only that the room is a shallow tide pool the moon forgot, and that they are all, every one of them, mostly me, held briefly in shapes that ache and shout and cling.
Drink another cup. Sweat it into the crowded dark. It comes to me eventually, all of it, through pipe and river and rain and the long slow weeping of the ground. I am in no hurry.
I have every drop you have ever held, and I am only lending you this round.