The music is a low thump now, a heartbeat through the floor, and we are all here watching you decide whether to sleep.
Understand what stands in this kitchen. The lungfish gulped air from a drying puddle so that these lungs could exist, and you are using them to laugh at something on a friend's glowing rectangle, a laugh so hard no sound comes out. The shrew who froze in the leaf litter while the great reptiles passed overhead gave you these ears, and you have aimed them at a story about someone named Kevin.
Four billion years of not being eaten, and the relay ends its Saturday like THIS. We are beside ourselves.
The woman who guarded the coals through the wet season, who slept in shifts so the fire would not die, look. Look at what her fire became. A ring on a countertop, blue and obedient, keeping a kettle warm for people who are not even cold. There is food left out.
Left out. The man who buried the seed corn through a starving winter and did not eat one kernel is standing at your shoulder, staring at a bowl of chips nobody wants, and he cannot make his mouth work.
We built this body to run from lions. You are using it to sit on a kitchen floor at three in the morning, back against a cabinet, shoulder to shoulder with someone you love, saying nothing.
We were braced. We are always braced. That is what four billion years teaches: brace.
And here you are. Warm, fed, unhunted, unhurried. Safe enough to waste a whole night on nothing.
We do not fully believe it.
But we are going to be very quiet now, all of us, and let you have it.