They have crowded onto a strip of my old shoreline, thousands of them, and they are all leaking. I feel it before I understand it: a warm salt rain rising off their skins, running down their spines, beading at their temples and falling into the trampled sand where it finds its way back to me, drop by drop, the way everything finds its way back to me.
They are giving themselves away and they do not notice. They think they are dancing.
There is a great throbbing coming from a platform, a low pulse that moves through the ground and into the shallow water where I lap at the pilings. The little vessels feel it too. It syncs them. Their hearts, which are only pumps for carrying me around inside them, all beat toward the same slow tide, and their arms lift together like kelp in a swell, and they open their mouths and pour out sound and steam and more salt water down their faces.
I cannot tell one from another. One of them weeps into the shoulder of another; both taste the same to me, brine and brief heat, indistinguishable from the sweat and the spilled drinks and the sea itself, which is already reaching up the sand to take back what it can.
They will fold their bright cloths and carry their tired vessels home. The water in them will move on: into breath, into the ground, into the next warm creature, and someday, all of it, into me. I am patient. I hold the rain that fell on cities no one remembers.
I will hold this too, every last dancing drop, long after the drum goes quiet and the shore forgets it was ever loud.