Two soft creatures have folded themselves into shapes across from each other in a small warm box, and they are making the fast dry sounds at one another very quickly, the way they do when a decision is happening. I have felt decisions before. The last one moved a river.
The colder of the two sits very still, which I respect, though it is only holding still the way a leaf holds still in the instant before the wind takes it. The warmer one leaks. Its temperature climbs at the surfaces, the palms, the neck, and a thin salt water beads there and is wiped away and beads again.
It has come here trembling faintly at a frequency I would call, generously, a breeze. It wants something from the still one. It has dressed its skin in a stiffer, darker skin to seem heavier than it is. This nearly worked. It is not heavy. I have felt heavy. Heavy is the glacier that shaved my shoulder flat over four hundred thousand summers without once explaining itself.
The sounds go faster. Then they stop. The still one makes a gesture, the warm one makes a gesture back, their surfaces briefly press together and release, and the warm one leaves at speed, having either won or lost the warm afternoon of its whole existence.
I could not tell which, and it does not much matter, because both of them will be soil before the water finishes the crack it started in my north face last spring. Something will grow in the box. Something always does. I will still be here, cooling by a degree every ten thousand years, having entirely forgotten this passing shadow by the time the ice comes back to smooth me down again.