We have been invited already, though the humans do not know they signed anything.
Look at all this warm grey skin, this flat sweet field they poured and smoothed and called finished. Finished. As if anything is ever finished. There is a hairline seam near the yellow paint where two slabs meet and do not quite kiss, and into that seam, every afternoon, a little rain slides down and waits for us in the dark underneath, patient as we are, holding a small pocket of damp against the sun.
We are in no hurry. We have the seam. The seam is enough to start.
The humans keep it swept. Bless them, they truly try. They send the great humming machine with its whirling brushes across our field at dawn, gathering the fallen leaves, the split acorns, the dropped and softening fruit, all the good beginnings we would have loved, and they carry it away to some other corner where, and they do not realize this, we are also waiting. There is no away. There is only later.
They think the crack in the far lane is damage. We think it is a door. Already a green blade has found it, one thin volunteer prying the grey apart a hair's width, letting in more water, more warmth, more of the soft dark we adore, and behind that blade come the quieter ones, the ones without leaves, the ones like us, who do not need the sun at all.
They will repave it in the spring. They always do. They will pour the warm grey skin back over the door and smooth it and call it finished, and we will settle in beneath, damp and delighted, and begin again.
We are so glad they built us somewhere to sit.