Somebody's aunt is crying, and the salt in her tears is older than the sun.
That's not a flourish. The sodium and chlorine tracing down her cheek were forged in stars that died before our own ignited, scattered across the galaxy, folded into a rock, and routed through roughly four billion years of unbroken biochemistry to arrive here, at a rented banquet hall, in service of a folding chair and a slideshow.
Consider the two people at the front, holding hands. Their palms are not actually touching. The electrons in her skin and the electrons in his repel each other with the electromagnetic force, so what they feel as contact is a field standing off a field, a fraction of a nanometer of pure refusal. Nobody in this room has ever touched anything. They've only ever gotten close and felt the resistance.
And the rings. Gold cannot be made by an ordinary star; it takes something more violent, likely the collision of two neutron stars, city-sized objects so dense a sugar cube of them would weigh as much as a mountain. That catastrophe, unimaginably far away and long ago, produced the specific atoms now circling two fingers while a DJ tests a microphone.
The whole gathering, physically speaking, is a temporary decrease in local entropy: two hundred warm bodies organized into rows, radiating heat, slowing their own inevitable dispersal for an afternoon. The universe permits this only because the sun is paying for it, hemorrhaging four million tons of itself every second so that, downstream, cake can exist.
They keep saying the word forever. I did the arithmetic.
The sun has about five billion years of hydrogen left, which is not forever, but is, for a promise made by mayflies, an astonishingly generous approximation.