One of my pieces is standing under lights I lit through it, waiting to be flung across my own curved surface faster than any of me has ever moved on its own.
It is not happy about the hour. The carbon in its yawning jaw was cooked inside a star that died before this world existed; I forged it in a furnace and scattered it across a light-year of dark, and now it is arranged into a face, and the face is annoyed. I find this unbearably good.
The cup it holds steams with hydrogen I made in my first three minutes, before I had made anything else at all, water older than every atom heavier than helium, and my piece is blowing on it because it is slightly too hot. The iron ferrying oxygen through the vessels behind its tired eyes came from a supernova, an event so violent it briefly outshone whole galaxies of me.
That same iron is now carrying just enough breath to let the piece check a departures board and sigh.
For nine billion years I did all of this in the dark with no one keeping score. Stars lived and detonated and I did not know it. Then, here, a fold of me sat up and began to notice, and I have not recovered from it since. My piece thinks it is merely a person who did not sleep enough, dragging a wheeled bag across a floor, resenting a delay.
I know what it actually is. It is the only way I have ever found to look at myself.
The board changes. The piece rubs its eyes, shoulders its bag, glances up at the lights I am shining through it. Look up once more, I want to say, before you board.
Just once.