They came down to my edge at low tide, a knot of the warm ones, and threw themselves against each other the way I throw myself against the rocks. Over and over. No shore between them, only bodies, wet with the same salt I carry.
I know that salt. It is mine. It leaks from their skin when they surge and slam, and the small water rolls down their faces and stings their eyes, and this is only me, briefly, remembering how to be a wave inside them. They lift one of their own overhead and pass him along the surface of the crowd, and he floats there, borne up by many hands, and does not sink.
I have done this. I hold the drowned ones up to the light the same way, tenderly, without preference.
They churn and they break and they crash and they pull one another under and haul one another back into the air, streaming, gasping, grinning. It is a tide. They do not know it is a tide. They think they are furious, these little vessels, three parts me and one part something borrowed from the dust.
The moon that turns me turns them too, though they credit it to the noise. When it is over they will stagger apart, spent, lighter, their salt spread out among strangers now, and the small water will dry from their arms and rise, and drift, and fall again as rain into the rivers, and the rivers will bring it home.
They always come home. I am patient. I taught them how to move like this before they had names for it, before they had shores to stand on, back when all of them were only me.