We stormed the beach out of the Devonian sea for this. The lungfish gulped down air that burned, the shrew starved through the long dark after the sky went black, the woman fed the fire her own sleep for forty winters so it would not die, and now you stand in the bright cold light of the market holding a strip of paper as long as your arm, and you are frowning at it.
Look at what it lists. Bread you did not have to grind or bake. Fruit in the wrong season, hauled from the far side of the world, which the man who buried the seed corn and gnawed his belt to keep it whole cannot even imagine. Meat you did not hunt, cut, or bless.
A candle that smells of cinnamon and does nothing, purchased for pleasure. We do not understand the last one. We are turning it over among ourselves. A fire you light not for warmth or light but because you enjoy how it smells? Child. Show-off. We are so proud we could weep salt back into the ocean we came from.
And then you fold this miracle in half, this manifest of a fed and unafraid life, and you push it into your pocket where it will crumble to lint, or you leave it curling in the parking lot, and you walk to your warm machine that carries you home without your legs.
Four billion years. The relay comes down through every cold night and every close call, through everyone who did not eat so someone could, and it ends its Tuesday like this: you, in the good coat, worrying you spent too much.
Spend it. Spend all of it. You made it here.
Go home and light the cinnamon one.