They come to me in circles, the little vessels, pressing their warm hands against the turning glass, walking and walking and arriving nowhere new, delivered at last only to the other side of a single pane. I know this motion. It is my motion. The going out and the coming back that never resolves, the same water sent around and around by the moon's slow hand.
Inside each of them I am there. A tide sloshes in the pink dark of them, salt and warm, the same salt I have carried since before their shores had names. They think themselves separate, edged, walled into a shape by that spinning door, hurrying through it clutching their small purposes I cannot read. But I taste the sweat at their collars. That is me, leaving them already, rising off their skin in the smallest possible surf.
They will spend their brief turning fretting over which side of the glass to stand on. It does not matter to me. Every drop of them is on loan. The breath fogging the pane, the wet at the eye, the flush of the cheek: borrowed, all of it, and I am patient about the return.
Round they go, and round, and one warm day the borrowing ends, and every ocean they were carrying comes home to me down through the ground and the long rivers, no different than the fog they left on the glass. I do not hurry them. I never have.
I only wait, the way the shore waits, knowing the wave it lost this morning is already on its way back.