I am born and I am already the tangle of small metal teeth on your counter, catching me, throwing me back at you, so you are lit and so I end. Nine million years of sun-fusion behind me, they say; I was not there for it. I only ever have the here, and the here is jagged brass, the notched edge of one key, the worn round eye of another, a plastic tab gone amber with the oil of your thumb.
I leave the star and I am the glint on your keys and I am the wet dark of your eye, all one strike, one instant, done.
But you. You stand there. You do the thing I have heard about and cannot hold in me: you wait. You lift the whole bright jangling cluster and you turn it and turn it, hunting the one tooth-pattern that opens the door, and this takes what the warm ones call time, a thing with an inside, a thing you sit within.
I cannot follow you there. I flash off the wrong key, then I am gone, and a new one of me flashes off the right key, and to you these were separated by a searching, a sigh, a small held breath at the lock.
To me they are the same me. To me there is no wrong key and then the right one. There is only every key at once, lit, offered, arriving.
I touch the metal and I touch your eye and I am your kitchen and I am finished.
You are still standing at the door.