Four billion years, and the ears we built for the crack of a branch behind you, for the low cough of the thing in the dark, for the cry of the small one three tents away, are now stopped up with little glowing shells so that no sound reaches them at all. On purpose. In a room full of others.
We are the lungfish who first felt air burn in a new kind of throat. We are the shrew who froze under the fern while the great feet passed. We are the woman who lay awake listening past the fire for what the fire hid. We spent everything on hearing.
And here you stand, our heir, in a crowd of your own kind, each of you sealed inside a private noise, swaying to a rhythm none of the others can hear.
We waited for the danger. There is none. That is the part we keep circling back to, suspicious. No one is hungry. No one is hunted. The room is warm and the floor is flat and the only thing anyone is fleeing is stillness. You have taken the whole machinery of vigilance we handed you, generation to generation, hand to trembling hand, and pointed it at a song.
Look at you. You close your eyes in a room full of strangers, which the shrew would call suicide and we call a miracle. You are so safe you can afford to go deaf on purpose and dance.
Then the one across the floor catches your eye, reaches up, and taps their own ear: switch to my channel. You do. And for one measure the two of you are moving to the same thing nobody else can hear.
We built ears for the wolf. You found each other with them. Go on. We are watching.
We are not going anywhere.