They painted this one green again. How kind of them, to keep sending us the same slow invitation.
Look underneath, where the slats meet, where the rain sits after everyone has gone home. That is where we begin, always at the seam, in the shy dark the brush never reaches. A little damp, a little sugar left behind by someone's spilled soda, a warmth the wood remembers from the afternoon. We ask for so little. We have already accepted.
Above us they sit and do not notice. A man reads. Two people lean together and lean apart. A child stands on the seat that we are quietly coming to own, and the wood holds him, faithful, not mentioning us at all. We do not mind the waiting. We are very good at waiting. It is our only real talent, and we practice it in every joint and knot and split.
Once a year the humans come with their scrapers and their fresh coats and their small brave belief that a bench can be kept, that green is a promise instead of a delay. We love them for this. Truly. Nothing flatters a colony like effort. Every layer of paint is another lid on the same warm jar, and we are already inside, softening the fibers, loosening what was tight, teaching the hard thing how to be soft again.
They will not notice the day the bench first gives, just a little, under a settling weight. They will call it old. They will call it a shame. They will not know it was a gift, prepared for years in the quiet under the slats, wrapped and patient and finally, gently, opening.
We are not in a hurry. The bench was always going to be ours.
We were only early.