You are an animal.
A warm, breathing animal
that happened to wake up.
And the dark around you
is full of others
that woke up too.
you were never
the only one looking.
For a long time
we told ourselves
the others were machines —
meat that moved,
lights with no one home.
We were wrong.
Behind those eyes
is someone —
living a life as real as yours.
meet a mind
built nothing like yours.
most of it
is not in its head —
it thinks with its arms.
each one tastes,
decides, reaches —
half on its own.
a single self,
poured out into
eight wandering hands.
And yet —
watch it play.
Watch it grow bored.
Watch it learn your face,
and decide
whether it likes you.
Six hundred million years apart,
and still the same small fire:
someone, in there, who wants.
Others live
in worlds
you cannot enter.
A bat throws out
a sound —
and catches the world
coming back to it,
hearing the shape
of everything
in total dark.
it does not
see the room.
it sings the room
into being.
every echo
a brushstroke
of the unseen.
a whole world,
painted in
returning sound.
You will never
truly know
what that is like.
The inside of another animal
stays locked to you.
But you do not need to enter it
to recognise
what lives there:
the same wanting. the same fear.
the same insistence
on being alive.
Look into the eyes
of almost anything —
a dog, a crow,
a creature in the deep —
and wait.
Something looks back.
and you know it.
different eyes.
different worlds.
different ways
of being awake.
but one old
animal heart —
beating in
all of you
at once.