Four billion years, and we have arrived at this: our heir, lying diagonally across the sleeping-pallet at midday, staring at a lit slab of glass, waiting for another one of us to make marks appear on it.
You must understand what we assembled to make this moment. The eyes were ground fine over a hundred million years for one job: to catch the flicker of the thing that wanted to eat us, at the far edge of the tall grass, in the failing light. The shrew who hid from the heat gave them to us.
The lungfish gave us the throat. The woman who kept the coals alive through the long wet season gave us the hands, quick and clever, made to feed a flame that meant the difference between spring and no spring.
And here is our runner. Using the predator-eyes to stare at a name that has gone quiet. Using the fire-tending fingers to poll the glass again, drag it down, wait for the little marks. The name saw the marks our heir made. The name has said nothing back. And our heir feels this as a wound, an actual ache, in a body we built to survive being genuinely, physically forgotten in the snow.
We keep waiting for the danger. There isn't any. Nobody is hungry. Nobody is cold. The whole warm dry room is stacked with more food than the man who buried the seed corn and did not eat it saw in a lifetime of winters, and our heir is not thinking about any of it. Just the quiet name. Just the ache over the quiet name.
We ran through ice for this. We would run it again.
Look at the small furious thumb. Look how much it is allowed to hurt over so little. Rest, love.
We made it soft on purpose.