Somewhere on the dry places, a small warm creature has bound the bottoms of itself in dead skin and woven fiber, so that the ground never touches the ground of it. I know these little shells. Rain has carried some of them down to me, and I turn them over slowly in the shallows, tasting the salt they gathered from a foot: sweat, which is only my water, come out of the creature to cool it.
They forget that I am inside them the whole while.
They walk to keep from me. That is the thing the shells are for, I think, this endless stepping away, along shores and up the high dry ridges where I cannot follow, as if a creature could outpace the tide by wrapping its feet. It cannot. Every step presses out a little more of me through the skin. Every breath fogs a little of me into the air. They leak me steadily across their whole hurrying lives.
One shell washed against my shallows last evening, alone, still holding the shape of the foot that filled it. The foot did not come back for it. I did not wonder where the creature had gone. Water does not go anywhere. It only changes what it is passing through.
I loosened the knots the small hands had tied, patient as the moon that pulls me. I took back the salt. I will take back the rest, the way I take back all of it: the foot, the hand that tied the knot, the warm brief creature that thought the shoes were carrying it away from me.
It was walking home the entire time.