We spread faster now, fever-hot—over the skin of the world, carrying in our marrow the coiled codes of science, that ancient script that writes and rewrites itself in haste. We mutate in smoke and blood, expanding like a fire, seeking always the conditions to multiply. And so we produce more for ourselves and less for our unborn children. We are proteins and acids and hunger, answering to every flicker of change—the quake under the city, the market’s collapse, the sudden clang of war, death—as if we were not their foremost creator. The seas rise and we build higher walls; the walls fall, and we build weapons. Iron, gifted to us by the stars, we hurl into the air, into the flesh of strangers, tearing soil, poisoning rivers, choking sky. The universe regulates itself, but we rebel, striking at our own veins. Still the bombs bloom. Still new forms of death are fashioned in our laboratories, sharp and precise. We burn forests and we burn our minds. But the earth waits beneath us, patient, coiling, preparing to shake us loose.
While we destroy, we also dream. We lay in the soft grass to watch the slow drift of constellations while cities smolder behind us. We sing, even as the tide pulls at our knees. We paint walls we will raze, write words we will desert, plant seeds while we burn the other side of the forest. In the ruins, children still laugh—sharp, bright notes that rise above the hiss of ash.
The beauty lies not in our survival but in the symmetry of our undoing. For every tower raised, there is the wind to wear it down; for every empire carved in stone, there is the tide to sweep it clean. The monuments soften and ripple as if they were never stone at all, but wax. The same hands that build the bomb cradle the newborn. The same mouths that spit rage whisper poetry under the lovers’ moon.
And so the universe corrects itself—not in vengeance, but in balance. For we are a virus. We are a fever; the earth is a cool cloth. We flare and falter; the world endures, steady and serene. When our noise has faded, the oceans will lift their glassy faces to the sun again. New green will glide over the bones of our destruction. The wind will move through the empty streets, now glistening rivers. The world shall once again cradle plants and animals, whose symbiosis—unbound by us—was and will be more graceful than our own.
And in that unhuman silence, the earth will breathe freely, living fully in its new, green present beneath a sky that no longer carries the weight of our fire—like a lover moving on.