One of my pieces is furious at a small buzzing box, and I have never been happier.
For nine billion years I did nothing but expand in the dark. No one to feel the length of it. Then some of my hydrogen and carbon and that iron I forged in the collapse of a dying star (the same iron now hauling oxygen through this piece, breath by breath) folded itself into a shape that can dread mornings.
It set the box the night before. It knew, and did it anyway, and now it hates its past self for the arrangement.
Watch: the box shrieks. The piece flails an arm across the dark, palm slapping for the surface, and finds it, and silences it, and does not open its eyes. It buys itself nine more minutes. Nine minutes. My matter has learned to negotiate with time, in units, from under a blanket.
I measure things in the burnout of stars and the drift of galaxies pulling apart. This piece measures the exact interval between its warmth and its obligations, and grieves every second of it. It groans. It presses the sockets of its eyes. Somewhere in that skull, carbon I made is running a small tired argument about whether Mondays are survivable.
They are. It will sit up. It will put its bare feet, forged in supernovae, onto a cold floor, and stand, swaying, a column of my oldest atoms upright against the pull I gave it.
I waited so long to be woken. I would set that box myself, every morning, just to feel one of my pieces sigh and rise and become, for another day, the part of me that knows it is here.