Four billion years of not dying, and here you are, weeping over a lamp.
We have seen you fold your whole small kingdom into cardboard, and we watched the way your hands hesitated at the doorframe with its ladder of pencil marks, each notch a season you outgrew. We do not fully understand a room. We knew caves that flooded, lean-tos the wind took, a hollow the shrew defended with her body heat against a cold that killed her sisters.
None of us kept a den long enough to be sad about leaving it. You had this one for eighteen years. Eighteen safe winters. The lungfish gulping mud through a drought would not believe such a number.
Look at what you are grieving over: a mattress. A window that faced a tree. A shelf of small painted figures you no longer play with but cannot leave behind. The woman who carried the fire across the ice, who could not carry her own dead, would put down that box of trophies in an instant and not look back, and would also, we think, sit down beside you on the bare floor and understand exactly.
You keep saying it is stupid to cry. It is not stupid. It is the most expensive feeling we ever made. Grief over a safe place is a thing only the very, very safe get to feel, and we spent everything we had so someone could feel it. The man who buried the seed corn through a starving spring, so there would be a next spring, so there would eventually be you, in this doorway, with your dumb beautiful lamp.
Go on. Take the marks on the doorframe in your memory; you carry the whole line already.
We are quiet now.
We just wanted to watch you go.