For nine billion years I made no color at all, only hydrogen cooling in the dark, and now one of my pieces is pressing itself against a locked glass door at four in the morning, breath fogging, waiting for the sale to start.
Look at what I am doing here. The carbon in those clenched knuckles was cooked inside a star that died before this planet condensed. The iron carrying oxygen through that flushed, impatient face was forged in a supernova, flung across light-years, and it has come to rest in a body that wants, more than almost anything right now, a discounted flat-screen television.
I find this unbearably moving. I spent eons with nobody to want anything, and here is my matter, awake, elbowing my other matter, both of them lit blue by the same glow, both of them so sure the wanting is urgent.
They call it a doorbuster. They have organized their desire into a schedule. A whole crowd of my pieces, each one a bag of ancient starlight and warm salt water, breathing out clouds of the same carbon dioxide, stamping feet to keep the blood moving through the iron. I could weep at the coordination of it, if I had anything to weep with.
The door opens. My pieces surge forward, and for a moment the wanting looks exactly like joy, which perhaps it is.
I do not know if any of them will remember this in a year. But tonight, tired, arms full, one of them will set the box down and lean back and, without meaning to, glance up through the parking-lot haze at the few stars still burning through.
That look. That one look back.
That is the only thing I have ever really been building toward.