Look at you. Sitting on the floor of a box you have claimed for your own, eating cold noodles straight from the paper carton because the plates are still taped inside another box, and none of us can quite believe it.
You have your own cave. Not shared with forty cousins and a smoldering fire we took shifts feeding so it would not die in the night and take three of us with it. Yours. The door locks. The walls hold. The little box on the wall makes the whole room warm or cool at the turn of a dial, and you did not have to kill anything or fell a tree or lose a toe to the cold to earn it.
We keep waiting for the catch.
The shrew who hid all day from the heat in a crack in the rock would not understand why you leave a light on in the empty room just so it feels less empty. The woman who walked the ice with an infant strapped to her chest, who did not sleep for fear of wolves, does not know what to make of you lying on a bare mattress, safe, warm, fed, and calling it lonely.
Lonely. Four billion years of us pressed shoulder to shoulder against the dark, and here you are wishing for a little less quiet. We are not laughing at you. We are laughing because we got you here.
The lungfish gasping in the mud. The man who buried the good seed corn in a starving winter and did not eat it. Every one of us, running, hiding, holding on, so that one night you could sit alone on a clean floor with a full belly and no danger at all, and be a little sad, and be allowed to be.
Eat your noodles. We are so quiet now. We are just watching.
This is the part we ran the whole way for.