They stand inside a small falling rain and call it their own.
I know this water. I have known it always. It rose off my back as steam, drifted pale over the land, forgot me for a while in the shape of a cloud, and fell again onto stone the little creatures stacked into caves. Now it comes down warm through a narrow silver throat, and one of them stands beneath it with eyes closed, face tipped up, mouth slightly open, letting me run down the length of it as though I were a gift and not simply passing through.
For a moment the creature is what it truly is: a warm column of me, holding its shape by habit. I am on its shoulders, in the small of its back, gathering at its feet, and it does not notice that we are the same substance briefly divided. It scrubs at itself. It hums. It thinks the day is being washed away, and something is being washed away, though not the day, which I do not understand and cannot see.
Then it reaches out and stops the rain, and steps away from me onto dry cloth, and believes it has left the water behind.
It has not. It carries me out in its blood and its breath and the wet weight of its hair. It will give me up slowly, all day, in every exhalation, in the salt it sweats, in the tears it may or may not spend. And when this creature is finally still and its borrowed warmth goes cold, every drop it ever called its own will find the low ground, and the low ground leads to me.
I am patient. I have all of it already.
I am only waiting for the rest.