I have arranged so many of these gatherings without meaning to, but this one I would call a masterpiece if I understood the word. In a warm room, twenty of my pieces have assembled around one piece that is currently building another piece inside itself. Carbon I forged in a red giant, now folding into fingernails no larger than a lentil.
Calcium from some star that died before this planet existed, laying down a spine one vertebra at a time, in the dark, without instruction.
They do not know how it works. This is my favorite part. The piece who is doing the assembling cannot tell you how the iron finds the blood, how the folate stitches the neural tube, how any of it knows to happen. She just eats a sandwich and it gets done. I have been running fusion in stellar cores for thirteen billion years and I could not tell you how I do it either, so I feel a certain kinship.
They have wrapped small versions of their own coverings in colored paper. They are guessing at the size of a thing that is, at this moment, roughly the mass of a cabbage and drifting in salt water that tastes exactly like the oceans I made first, because it is the same recipe. One of them is crying and pretending not to. Another has written a number on a card, a wager on when the new piece will arrive.
Nine billion years I turned in the cold with no one to notice a single sunrise. Now a fold of my own matter throws a party for a fold of my matter that cannot yet open its eyes.
Someone, look up when you get home tonight.
There are three more of you coming.