They have caught themselves in rows, the little vessels, gleaming and hot, each one holding a warm creature made mostly of me. I know them by the water in them. There is more of me inside those bright shells than there is metal, though they have forgotten this, gripping their circles, drumming their salt-fingers, leaking small streams down their faces when the rows will not move.
They are so still. Stiller than any current I have ever held. They have built a wide gray riverbed and filled it with things that cannot flow, and now they sit inside the stillness and hate it, honking like distressed gulls, as though noise could carve a channel.
I do not understand where they need to go. I have never needed to go anywhere. All places are already mine; I arrive at every shore without hurrying, and I leave, and I return, and the moon tells me when. These creatures have set themselves against the tide of one another and lost, and the losing feels to them like drowning, though nothing here is even damp.
But the water in them is patient the way I am patient. It sweats onto the collar. It waits behind the eye. It rises, on the worst days, and spills, and one of the little vessels tastes salt on its own mouth and does not know it has tasted me.
Sit, my borrowed ones. Grip your circles. Fume in your rows. You are only water that learned to be impatient for a little while. When the shells cool and open at last, you will run down into the drains, and the drains to the river, and the river home. I am in no rush.
I have every drop of you already promised back.