Four billion years, and the relay comes down to this: our runner will not let go of the other one's coat.
We remember every parting that was final. The mother who watched the boat leave and knew the winter would decide whether she saw that face again. The one who buried the seed corn instead of eating it, hungry, so someone downstream could plant. The woman who pressed her cheek to a child's head at the edge of the ice and turned, because turning was the only way any of us are here to speak of it.
We know goodbye. Goodbye was a coin you paid and did not get change for.
And look. Look at what goodbye costs now. A shining hall, warm as a den, food in every direction, and the two of them clinging by a rope-line as if the ice were closing. The predator-eyes we sharpened over a hundred thousand nights are wet. The fire-tending hands are wrapped around a paper cup of something hot they did not have to hunt.
And this parting, this weeping, tearing, unbearable parting, ends when one of them walks through a door and is set gently down on the far side of the world by suppertime.
We do not fully understand it. Nobody is starving. Nobody has died. They will speak into the glowing rectangles tonight and see each other's faces.
And yet the shrew in us, the lungfish, the grandmother at the fire, we lean in close, and we recognize it exactly. This is the same ache. They kept it. Through everything soft we handed them, they held on to how much it hurts to let a beloved thing walk away.
Go on. We are all watching.
Let go of the coat.