"How can you still have hope in your kind?", the alien asked, as their ships decorated the blue skies with gray.
"We need each other", the human ambassador replied.
"Your kind is one of war".
"Your kind is one that silences itself".
"Your kind got used to its cruelty".
"And yet, we can still be delighted by sunlight".
"You are close, yet divided and distant from each other".
"From our differences we find harmony and reasons to connect. This is more prevalent than our hate".
"All I see is your kind spiraling down to nothing. Your planet is dying, you hate each other, and you do not believe in a future anymore".
The ambassador did not reply.
"Your museums are filled with relics of ruin, ambassador, and your own body has scars from the wars you inflict upon each other. Your kind can never discover all living creatures on Earth, for you have already killed too many things you will never have the pleasure of knowing".
The alien shook their/its head.
"Your punishment is solitude and guilt".
The aliens looked down upon the human.
"Spiraling down our minds, you still saw something good. Otherwise, you would have killed us on sight, like you did with others in the past. In our darkest moments, we learned how to make fire. You saw a fossil of an old woman without teeth, and yet, she lived for long enough for her wounds to heal. If we were truly cruel, she would have been killed. If we were truly crooked, she would have been abandoned. Yet, she was kept alive, and someone was kind enough to feed her, even when she was toothless".
The human rose his/her/their voice.
"What is real resists the lies of convenience".
"You speak with fancy words, but I cannot believe any of them. We saw what you did".
"You saw war and how it can disappear from your mind as you get used to it, but you are still watching us fight against it".
"You can make a bad person fall, but you cannot stop your own nature".
"Our love and our caring is our nature, and it finds a way".
"Describe how it does so, then. Prove it. Show us what you can do, even after everything you saw".
"We cannot describe our care, and the more we try, the more we fail. We look at those we love and all we can do is think about how distant we are from them, and how utterly incapable we are of showing them how much we love them. When I go to sleep next to my partner and I see their back, and I hug them close to me and listen as their breathe in and breathe out, all I can do is think about how I will never be able to hold them as much as I need to. I can make all the poetry in the world and do the impossible, and yet this wont satisfy me.
I could scream at the top of my lungs and paint a canvas with romantic pink and save the world. I could do all of that and it would never be enough. My partner will tell me, when I go back home, that they know I love them and I know they love me back, and I will agree, but still cry as I say 'I am sorry for not showing you enough'.
My partner does not take away from me. They do not fulfill me. They simply make me understand that I cannot stop caring for them".
Silence in the courtroom of aliens that think they can judge others.
"You listened to our songs, you saw your movies, you read our books and listened to our stories. You saw us die and live. You saw everything that mades us ourselves and you refuse to accept us, because you cannot fathom the idea of an alien species that both care and hate and live and die and create and destroy. You cannot live with the idea of choosing to be better. You want to be born good and pure of cruelty so you can feel less guilty about your own mistakes".
And the aliens could not say anything back, nor the billions of humans that were watching their own judgement through screens, nor the other many alien species that survived the invaders cruel purity.
"You can kill me. But humanity won the moment we realized death may only exist as long as we are alive to name it".
