Four billion years, and you have chosen today to weep quietly in a stairwell over a room you get to leave. We do not understand. We buried the seed corn through a whole starving winter to hold a place we could not leave. You are grieving a place you may go from freely, on your own legs, into food and warmth and no wolves.
And yet. And yet we felt it too, in the shrew who hid from the killing heat inside a hollow log and grew to know that log, its smell, the exact give of its bark, and did not want to leave it even when the heat broke. To love a shelter is old. Older than you know.
We watch you pack the small objects. The chipped cup. The photograph. The little plastic person on the desk that does nothing, guards nothing, cannot be eaten, and which you wrap in paper as though it were an ember. The woman who carried the fire across the ice wrapped it exactly so. We recognize the hands. We gave you those hands.
You hug the others. You say the words that mean I would have stayed in this log with you. You will not see most of them again and you both know it and you smile anyway, which is a thing no lungfish could do, and we are so proud of the smile we could burst.
Look at you. Sad because it was good. Do you understand what a summit that is? Every one of us ran through cold and teeth and hunger so that one runner, one day, could stand in a doorway aching only because the safe warm thing has ended.
Go home. Order the dessert. We are watching.
We are still, and we are watching, and we would not change one step of it.