Four billion years, and here you stand, swaying, in a line for the pissing-room, holding another woman's hair back while she is sick into a basin of clean water.
We remember when water was the whole war. The lungfish gulped mud and hoped. The shrew crossed a stream and lost two of her young to it. And you, our heir, our torchbearer, are surrounded by more clean water than a village saw in a season, and you are queuing to make it disappear.
We do not understand the queue. There is water everywhere. Why the line? Why the waiting, hip to hip, in this hot cave that thuds like a heart the size of a mammoth?
But look at your hands. Those are the fire-tending hands, the ones that kept the coals alive through the long dark, and right now they are gathering a stranger's hair away from her face so gently, murmuring you're okay, you're okay, almost there. The woman who kept the fire did that. Pressed her palm to a fevered forehead in the smoke and said the same soft nothing. We taught your body that before we taught it to walk.
You do not know her. You will not know her tomorrow. She smells of sweetness and sick and the strange chemical joy of your age, and you are spending your one precious Tuesday night guarding her like she is worth guarding.
The man who buried the seed corn and starved a little so spring could come, he did not know your name either. He did it anyway.
The bass hits. The line shuffles forward one step.
We go quiet, all of us, all four billion years, just to watch you hold her up.