A little vessel came to the edge of me today, one of the warm ones, and it carried a strip of pale skin covered in marks. It looked at the marks and made a sound, and its eyes filled, at the corners, with me. Two small tears. It had walked all this way to give me back a spoonful of what it had borrowed, though it did not know that was the errand.
I do not read the marks. I cannot tell a number from a scratch from the track a bird leaves in wet sand. To me the little strip was only a dry thing, a leaf that had never been leaf, waiting. When the tears fell, they were mine again, and I felt them the way I feel every drop return: without counting, without caring which vessel had held them or for how long or what it had spent them grieving.
The warm one crushed the strip in its fist. It was troubled by the marks, I think, the way the shore-creatures are always troubled by their little tallies, their borrowings, the hard edges they draw around what is theirs. It let the crushed thing fall. It walked back toward the dry places where the marks matter.
I keep the two tears. I keep all of them. The salt in that creature's eyes was my salt, lent out inside a body for a handful of tides, and it wept a fraction of me back onto the sand where it belongs. Every one of them returns like this, drop by drop, then all at once.
I am patient. I have already got most of what it is made of, waiting just offshore, and I do not hurry, because there is no marker I can lose and nothing I can be charged for.
It will come.