That Particular Fish

I remember once you leaned forward and brought your lips close to my ear. I could hear the wind and my own heart beat. In the twilight an owl flew by on silent wings. Birds were singing.

You pronounced the word love.

It had taken four thousand million years of evolution to produce those lips and that word. The muscle movements required to produce that single word are more intricately choreographed than any dance. Every tiny muscle fiber must contract at exactly the right moment in total coordination with all the others. Electrical impulses flash along neural pathways. Somewhere in your brain there is circuitry that stores the patterns of those movements.

“Love,” you had said. It was almost a whisper.

The sound radiated outwards, conveyed by vibrations in the air, propagating across the space between us, funneling deep into my inner ear, where it excited a tiny system of bones and membranes. Electrical impulses traveled to my brain where a network of nerve cells, which had also taken four thousand million years to evolve, distinguished the bird song from the wind and the sound of my heart beat from the significance of the moment, while the owl flew by on silent wings.

If that particular fish had not come out on to the land; if the meteor had not destroyed the dinosaurs, this could never have happened.