Play it again. You always play it again.
We have watched you press the small glowing shape and lift it to the ear we spent a hundred million years tuning to catch the snap of a twig, the cough of a big cat in the dark, the cry of your own across a valley. We built that ear for warnings.
You are using it to hear a voice that stopped four months ago say only that they picked up milk and would you call them back when you get a sec.
The lungfish did not understand air and gulped it anyway. The shrew held still in the dark while the ground shook with something enormous and did not run, because running was death, and stillness was the shrew who became you. The woman who kept the ember through the wet season carried it in a horn packed with moss, and when the man beside her died of the cough she carried the fire anyway, alone, because the fire was owed to someone not yet born.
That someone, across all the cold, all the crossings, all the fevers we outlasted, is you, sitting in a warm room with light you did not have to light, listening.
We do not fully understand this. We know grief; we buried our dead in flowers and red ochre and we grieved. But we grieved and then we walked, because behind us the winter was coming and it did not wait.
You do not have to walk. There is nothing behind you. That is the whole point of us.
So play it again. Hear them say *call me back.
* We spent four billion years so you could sit still, and safe, and keep the fire for someone who is gone.