The little vessel stands before a flat cold stone and looks for itself in the shine, and it does not know it is mostly me.
I am there, behind the eyes it studies so anxiously. I am the wet that rims them when it leans too close and worries at some line in its own surface. I am the slick inside its cheeks, the tide that climbs its throat when it is frightened, the salt it will spill down its face over things I cannot see and would not weigh if I could.
It thinks the creature in the stone is the real one. But that shape is only the borrowed part of me, poured into a warm mold, standing upright for a little while, arranging its brief edges.
It does not like what the stone shows today. Some hardness in the jaw, some sag, some spot. It touches the glass as if the trouble lived there and not in the water it carries. I have no opinion. I loved it the same when it was smaller and smoother and full to the brim of me, and I will love it the same when the mold gives way.
Lean closer, small one. Breathe on the cold stone and watch the fog bloom, that little cloud of me leaving you already, reaching for the glass, wanting home.
You will come back. You are three parts me and one part waiting. Every drop you are was rain once, and river, and the dark cold underneath the waves, and every drop will be again. The stone forgets your face the instant you step away. I do not forget, because there is nothing of you to forget.
There is only me, on loan, walking around in the shape of a worry, on its slow way back down to the deep.