Four billion years, and here you stand in shoes that hurt on purpose.
We are watching. All of us. The lungfish who gulped a first ragged breath of poison air. The shrew who spent every night of her life terrified and hid in the dark and mated anyway. The one who first buried a companion instead of leaving them, and knew grief, and did it because the ache meant something.
The woman who carried a coal wrapped in moss across a frozen valley so the family would not have to start the fire from nothing on the far side. All of us leaned in for this.
And it is: two of you, in the finest cloth your kind can weave, standing in front of everyone you have not lost yet, saying words out loud to make a private thing witnessed. We do not fully understand the paperwork. We understand the rest completely. You have chosen a person to be cold and hungry beside, except you will never be cold or hungry, and so you have chosen them for the strange soft version of that, the shared blanket, the divided last portion of cake, the hand to hold when the fever comes and, astonishingly, breaks.
You are crying. Both of you. Everyone is. The grandmother who kept the fire is weeping into a folded cloth and cannot say why, and we know why, we have always known why, it is that the danger is over and the two of you are safe enough to stand still and weep about being loved.
Go on. Dance badly. Eat too much. Stay up laughing under lights you did not have to hunt for.
We got you here. The rest is yours.
We will be quiet now, and watch you sway.