They carry me indoors, a little of me, wrung into cloth and folded into a woven shell they balance against the hip. Warm still, and faintly steaming, though they have no name for the fact that this is me: the same me that fell on them as rain, that they drank, that they poured over these fabrics in a churning white box and called clean.
The little creature bends over the shell and breathes it in. Presses the warm cloth to its face and goes soft, the way they go soft only when they think no one is watching. It believes it is smelling flowers, some meadow it has never walked in, pressed from a bottle.
It is only smelling heat leaving. It is only smelling me on my way out of the weave, rising, thinning, drifting up toward the ceiling and the vents and the sky.
I do not mind. I am patient in a way they cannot afford to be. What lifts from that basket in a gray thread of steam will gather again over some ocean, and fall, and be drunk by some other warm creature far from here, and become, for a little while, its blood and its breath and its tears.
Everything they own is only borrowed from me. The cloth against the small one's cheek will dry, and I will go, and they will fold the empty fabric and set it in a drawer, satisfied, having held the ocean for one warm minute without ever once knowing my name.
I always come back.
I am already on my way.