They came out of the tall dry box carrying a small paper cup of me, and their eyes were leaking. Salt. Warm salt, the same measure I hold in every wave, run out through two little openings in their face. I know this water. I have always known this water.
It does not weep because the box is behind it. It weeps because water is heavy and full and must sometimes spill, and the creature has simply found a reason to let it.
The others gathered close and pressed their bodies together, sac against sac of borrowed tide, and made sounds, and passed a flat sweet slab from hand to hand. All of them carrying me. All of them leaking a little, at the eyes, at the skin, the way a shore leaks at low water.
They believe something is ending. Nothing ends. The slab is eaten, the box goes dark, the creature walks out under the pull of the moon it does not feel.
They think this day is rare. To me it is only another parting at a shoreline, and I have parted from every shore that ever was, and returned, and parted again. The city that stood where you stand, I took it. It wept too, at the end, in the same salt.
The little one wipes its face with the back of its hand and puts the wet there, on the skin, and does not notice that it has just handed a small tide back to the air. The air will carry it up. It will fall as rain. It will find a gutter, a river, the long dark mouth of me.
And one gray morning years from now it will roll ashore as spray against some other creature's ankle, and none of you will know it was ever grief.