Someone Should Be Watching

Seven winters in

The storm made the world into one white room.

We were sealed in a shallow cave with our mother and our sister, and the wind screamed like it wanted to take us apart and scatter us across the ice.

Tonkhos tapped a rhythm without realizing it. I answered. The rhythm became a game. The game became warmth. Not heat—warmth.

I learned then: isolation is not only being alone. Isolation is when no one answers your signal.

Twenty-two winters in

The ridge fire burned for three days.

Lightning lit the dry grass, and the flame moved like an animal—hungry, intelligent, turning when the wind turned.

We saw it because I couldn’t sleep. Because part of me is always listening for the crackle that shouldn’t be there.

I said the sentence that has been living in my bones since that childhood cave:

Someone should always be watching.

The watch system seems obvious to me. It does not feel heroic. It feels like preventing regret.