There is a warm dark burrow near the loud place, and once each night for a stretch of a few beats, the soft quick creatures gather outside a door and press against one another in a slow-flowing line, the way water pools behind a fallen branch before it finds the way through. I have watched water do this for longer than any of them will exist. Water is more patient.
They radiate heat, a great deal of it, packed close, shifting foot to foot, and they hold small glowing pebbles up to their faces as if the light would tell them how long the waiting must last. It could not tell them. Nothing can tell them anything, being made as they are of moisture and speed and about eighty warm years, of which they spend this portion vibrating in a corridor.
Some of them make sounds at one another, quick clicks and rushes of breath, and touch one another's arms, and lean their heads together, and then one is pulled through the door and vanishes, and the pool shifts forward the width of a single body. To them, I gather, this is an eternity.
I have felt a glacier lie down on top of me and then, in a while, get up and leave. I know what an eternity weighs, and this is not it.
By the time the frost next cracks my northern face, not one of these will be warm anywhere. The burrow will fill with different quick things, or with silence, or with the slow patient dust that comes for every loud place. I will still be here, thinking the same thought I began before they arrived, and I will not have gotten to the end of it, and that is fine.
There is time.