They are lined against the wet wall, these little vessels, hip to hip in the dim, and each one is leaking me. I can feel it. The salt is rising off their skin in the heat, gathering at the temples, sliding down the small of a back, and none of them know they are weeping me back into the air.
They came here to lose it faster. The loud dark room behind them shakes the fluid in their bodies, and they drink more, and sweat more, and the line moves forward one vessel at a time toward the little white basin where they will pour still more of me away.
One of them is crying. I taste it before I understand it, the same salt, the same warmth, running the same downhill road as the sweat and the spilled cup at her feet, and I cannot tell her sorrow from her thirst. To me it is all one water, taking the shortest way down, as water always does.
They think they are waiting for a door. They are waiting the way a cloud waits, the way a river waits at the delta: pretending to be still, already leaving.
Every drop pooling under their shoes, every tear, every drink they carried in and will carry out, it was mine before they were born and it will be mine again. I held it in a glacier. I held it in a storm over a city that no longer has a name. I am only lending it to these warm hurried creatures for the span of one loud night.
Go on, then. Sweat. Weep. Pour it into the drain. It all runs to the same low place.
It is coming home to me.