be still for a moment.
Something warm is breathing
where you are sitting.
It has fur it lost long ago,
teeth made for tearing,
eyes built to find motion
in tall grass.
It is you.
You are a wild animal
reading a screen.
Your body is not modern.
It is almost exactly the same body
humans were born into
two hundred thousand years ago.
A baby born today
and a baby born on the open savanna,
before cities, before fire was tamed —
are the same animal.
You were built for that world.
and then the world changed
without telling your body.
naked on the grassland.
this body. exactly this one.
fire is tamed.
the body warms its hands.
the first words.
the first farms.
the body keeps the same heartbeat.
cities. engines. wars.
the body, unchanged.
and now —
a glowing rectangle
held close to ancient eyes.
This is why being alive
can feel so strange.
Your body still braces for predators —
so a buzzing phone
floods you like a footstep in the dark.
It still hoards sugar and fat
for a famine
that never comes.
And it still fears being cast out —
because for two hundred thousand years,
to be left by the group
was to die.
Here is the gentlest proof.
When you are cold —
or when a piece of music
opens something in you —
tiny muscles all over your skin
pull tight
and lift each hair on end.
Your body is trying to fluff a coat of fur
it has not had
in a million years.
goosebumps are a ghost —
an animal reaching
for a body it used to have.
You are not one creature.
You are many, stacked in layers.
Deep in your skull
is an ancient stem
that keeps you breathing
while you sleep, while you forget —
it has never needed you.
Wrapped around it,
the part that feels —
fear, hunger, love.
And only on the outside,
thin and new,
the part that is reading this
and thinks it is in charge.
somewhere inside you,
a muscle is squeezing.
a hundred thousand times
today alone —
it began beating
three weeks after you did.
it will beat
three billion times
and never once stop to rest.
You did not build any of this.
You do not tell your heart to beat.
You do not tell a cut to close,
or your food to become you.
Thirty-seven trillion cells
are doing their work
right now,
without asking,
without thanks —
a whole civilization
keeping you alive
while you think about something else.
And the strangest part —
the body reading this
is not the body
you had a decade ago.
Cell by cell, atom by atom,
you are being quietly torn down
and built again.
You are not a thing.
You are a pattern —
a flame, not the wood it burns.
Which means atom 738
is only visiting.
A few years ago it was somewhere else —
in the air, in the soil,
in a field of wheat.
You breathed it. You ate it.
Your body, without a word,
welded it into the muscle of your hand.
And soon it will leave again —
back to the air, the ground,
the next living thing.
You do not keep your atoms.
you are a place they pass through.
So be gentle
with the animal you are.
It is two hundred thousand years old.
It is tired. It is doing its best
in a world it was never built for.
And it has never, not once,
stopped trying to keep you alive.
Every ancestor you have ever had
survived long enough
to pass this body on.
the whole unbroken chain
ends in your chest.
Put a hand there.
Feel it
still going.