Two small vessels sit across a hard flat surface from each other, and both of them are leaking.
I taste it from the shore, always. One creature holds a cup of warm brown water it does not drink, only turns, turns, turns in its fingers, and the palms of the other have gone damp so that when they press hand to hand the salt passes between them, a small tide, a greeting older than any word they think they are saying.
The one being looked at speaks quickly, and with each breath a little of me leaves its mouth as fog and does not come back. Under the collar, at the temple, along the spine, it beads and gathers and rolls. It is trying so hard to seem solid. It does not know that I am counting it out of itself drop by drop.
I do not understand what the cup is for, or the flat surface, or why one creature has arranged its face into stillness while the other pours everything it has into the space between them. These are dry-land dramas, and dry land is a thing that happens briefly on top of me.
What I know is the water. What I know is that this warm nervous vessel is mostly borrowed, that the salt on its lip is my salt, the wet in its eye is my wet, and that all its careful hard edges are held together by a moisture it is losing even now.
It will call this an ending or a beginning. It cannot tell the difference; neither can I. Every drop it sweats and swallows and weeps is already turning, already sliding down through the ground toward the low places, toward me, coming home the long way. I am patient.
I have all of it, eventually.