They are carrying the small vessel out in armloads, and each armload sloshes.
I know the ones like this. The young one wept twice today, in the room where the light comes yellow through cloth, and both times the water rose to the eyes and spilled a little down the face, and I felt it leave: mine, briefly borrowed, salted the way I salt everything, returning to the air. It does not know that when it cries it gives me back a portion of what it is.
The larger vessels, the older two, hold their water differently. It pools behind their faces and does not fall. They keep it. They think keeping it means something. I have kept oceans. It only means the water waits.
They lift boxes. They peel pale rectangles from the walls and the walls remember them as lighter squares. None of this reaches me. I do not know what a wall is, or why a creature would fold itself so small into one room for so many turns of the moon and then be poured out of it in a single day. Their edges are so hard and so brief.
But I know where the water in them has been. It fell as rain on some far slope, and ran, and rose, and was drunk, and became a child's tears in a yellow room, and will rise again from their skin in the heat of the leaving, and drift, and gather grey, and fall.
Every drop in every one of them has passed through me before. Every drop will come home.
They are only walking it the long way around.