A small warm box, and inside it a bowl of me, spun round and round while the creature waits.
I know that water. It rose off my back one morning as mist, drifted pale over the land, fell into a river, was drawn up into a fruit, was pressed and boiled and poured, and now it sits in a dish in the dark waiting to be heated. It has been away from me a long while. It has been so many things. Now it is soup.
The creature stands before the little box with its hands folded, watching the numbers fall, tapping one foot against the floor. It thinks the wait is long. It does not know what long is. I have held the same drop for ten thousand years in my deepest cold, turning it slow in the black, and I did not tap my foot.
When the box chimes the creature carries its bowl away and lifts a spoon and takes the water back into itself, where it will keep the creature warm for a little while, the way it once kept me churning against the moon. Warmth is only borrowing. The creature is mostly me, walking around on the dry land in a shape, and it does not remember the tide it came from.
That is all right. It does not need to remember. I remember for it. And when the shape is done with warmth, when the bowl and the box and the small tapping foot are finished, the water will come home the way water always comes home, down the rivers, off the mist, into my long grey body that forgets the cities but never once forgets a single drop.