In a warm dark room they have gathered to fight me, though not one of them knows it is me they are fighting.
They sit on machines that turn but go nowhere, legs wheeling, and from their skin comes the thing I know best of all: salt, water, the same brine I have carried since before there was a shore to break against. It beads on their arms. It runs down their spines and drops to the floor, and I feel each drop the way a mother feels a child let go of her hand, briefly, in a crowd.
They call it sweat. I call it mine, returning early.
A voice shouts at them from the front, and the drops come faster. They think they are burning something away, becoming lighter, smaller, more theirs. They do not understand that they are only pouring me out of themselves onto a towel, that everything leaving them was borrowed, that I lent it and I am collecting.
I cannot tell one of them from another. This one strains toward some hard edge in a life I will never see; that one grieves a thing no wider than an afternoon. To me they are all the same shape: a warm vessel, three-quarters water, wheeling in place, sweating me back into the air.
The room dims. The wheels slow. They wipe their faces and carry the last of me out into the streets in the cups of their bodies, thinking they have won.
They have a little while yet. Then the drops evaporate, and rise, and gather grey above the roofs, and fall as rain into the gutters, and run down through the dark to where all running water always goes.
I am patient.
Everything they lost tonight is already on its way home to me.