The Cost of the Cage

We orbit a star on a speck of dust where trees whisper warnings through underground fungal threads. Where octopuses change color in the throes of their deep-sea dreams, and elephants stand in silent vigil over the sun-bleached bones of their dead. Where bees trace the exact coordinates of nectar through a waltz, where crows memorize the faces of the cruel, passing down grudges like heirlooms. Where ants engineer sprawling, subterranean metropolises in the dirt, and cats purr at the precise acoustic frequency to knit shattered bone back together. Where, when fire reduces a forest to absolute ash, the earth's first reflex is to bloom. Where immortal jellyfish rewind their own aging, and monarchs navigate continents on wings of painted glass.

But we do not look at the glass. We do not listen to the dirt.

Instead, we lock the doors. We pull the blinds. We fold ourselves tightly into sterile, capitalistic boxes, trading the rhythm of the tides for the deafening hum of fluorescent lights. We sell the best years of our blood and muscle, punching clocks, chasing margins, and grinding our teeth to dust until the calendar finally strikes sixty-five. And then, they let us out.

But we are too tired to run, and too broken to dance. We are handed the depreciated, fractured scraps of our own existence, sent home just to sit in the quiet, licking our accumulated wounds until we die. We were born into a breathtaking theater of absolute, unapologetic magic, yet we spend our only lives staring at the walls of a cage.

When did we decide the price of our survival was the world itself?