We fled a great many things to make you. The lungfish hauled itself across drying mud so it would not suffocate in a shrinking pool. The little shrew ran from teeth in the dark and ate what it could and shook with hunger through long cold nights. The woman who guarded the coals slept in shifts so the fire would still be alive at dawn.
And now here you are, our darling, the whole four-billion-year relay come down to this: paying to lift a weight and then put it back down exactly where you found it.
We do not understand this room. Nobody is chasing you. The metal is not food and does not need moving. You have chosen the cold sweat and the burning legs, the very sensations we spent an eternity teaching your body to avoid, and you have arranged them for a Tuesday evening under bright lights, voluntarily, in special shoes.
Some of us are laughing. The shrew cannot fathom it. But listen. That heart hammering in your chest is the same one we carried up out of the water, the same drum that outran the winter, and you are making it strong on purpose, for no reason but that you can.
You are not starving. You are not hunted. There is enough. Do you understand what that means? We buried the seed corn and did not eat it precisely so that one of us, someday, could be safe enough to be bored, safe enough to invent a hunger and then go feed it.
Go on. Finish the set. We are all leaning in, every one of us who ran so you would not have to, watching our heir strain against a weight that means nothing, and we have never been so proud.