The Sandalus niger larva hatches underground and immediately finds a cicada nymph, attaches to it, and spends years feeding on it slowly enough to keep it alive. The host does not die until the parasite is finished. You operate on a similar timeline. The work you do on something, the real work, runs deep and long before anyone sees a result.

The larva navigates total darkness, no landmarks, no light, oriented entirely by contact with a single host it will not release. You work the same way. You attach to a problem or a person with that same quality of grip, and you gather information through sustained proximity rather than broad surveying. Where others scan, you burrow. You are slow to commit and nearly impossible to dislodge once you have. The specific observation is this: you do not lose interest, you lose patience with surfaces.

Cicada populations depend on factors that are largely invisible to the ecosystem above ground, and Sandalus niger is one of them. Remove this beetle and the cicada emergence cycles shift in ways no casual observer would trace back to the cause. The people and systems around you depend on work you do that they have no language for, because it happens beneath their awareness. When you disengage, the gap takes years to surface. You are the reason certain things hold together, and that reason will never appear in the obvious record.