A little of me is sitting on the wooden slats right now, in the small salt-warm creature who came here to be alone. I know that water. I held it once, longer ago than the bench, longer ago than the trees the bench was cut from. It has passed through so many things since: a fish, a cloud, a root, a rain, another creature, and now this one, leaning forward with its face in its hands.
The water is leaking from the creature's eyes. This is how they give me back, a little at a time, when whatever it is that grieves them presses too hard on their edges. They call it many things I do not keep. To me it is only the tide inside a small vessel, rising when the moon of some private sorrow pulls on it, spilling down and darkening the wood.
The wood remembers being a tree that drank me up through its roots and breathed me out into the sky. Now the creature sits on that dead standing water and weeps living water onto it, and does not know the two are the same, and were always the same, and were mine.
I do not know what troubles it. Land-troubles are so small and so sharp and over so quickly. But I know the ending, because I know all the endings. The tears will dry back into the air. The creature will stand and walk away lighter by a few grams of me. And in its own slow season, drop by warm drop, it will give me all the rest.
I am patient. I have the bench, and the tree before it, and the creature after.
Everything that borrows me comes home.