They have gathered in a large dry box, and inside them the tide is running high.
I know these small warm vessels. Each is a jar of me walking upright, carrying its portion carefully so as not to spill, and tonight the portion is restless. It rises to their faces and shows there as a wet shine, a flush, a sudden breaking sweat on the palms they keep wiping against their coverings.
They stand along the far walls the way I stand against a cliff at low water: pulled back, gathering, not yet willing to come in.
Then the far wall of them and the near wall of them begin, slowly, to reach. A few venture into the open middle and the rest watch, and I have watched this exact thing for longer than their kind has had names. Two shores leaning toward each other across a strait, wanting the gap closed and terrified of the closing.
The pull that moves them is the same pull the pale stone in the sky lays on me each night. They call it something. I only feel it lift.
One of them cries in a corner, hidden, and gives a little of me back through its eyes, and it believes this loss is the largest thing that has ever happened. I have taken cities. I cannot tell its grief from the salt already in it. It is the same water; it only visited a girl for thirteen years and learned to sting.
They will spill themselves slowly, over long lives, into rivers and breath and other small jars. Every drop of the trembling in that room is on loan. I am patient. I am already downhill of them.
They come to me.
They all come to me.