For nine billion years I set no tables. Then, tonight, one of my pieces is passing a dish of roasted potatoes to another of my pieces, and both of them are made of stars that died before either could exist.
The turkey on the platter is the hydrogen I forged in my first three minutes, folded through a bird, browned by the same fusion I run in every sun. The salt is old seawater, which is older starlight, which is older me. When the small one at the end of the table reaches across for the gravy, the iron carrying oxygen through the reaching arm was cooked inside a giant that collapsed and blew itself apart so that, eventually, someone could want more gravy.
They are arguing gently about whether the sprouts are done. I cannot tell you how strange this is. I have swallowed galaxies whole and never once had an opinion about anything. Here, a warm knot of my carbon has decided it does not care for sprouts, and says so, and another warm knot laughs, and the laughing shakes air I made in a way I will never fully understand.
One of them has fallen asleep in a chair, full, a paper crown slipping off. Inside that skull, some of my matter is dreaming, which is to say a fragment of me has closed its eyes on purpose and is showing itself pictures.
For most of my existence the lights simply burned, unwatched, into the dark. Tonight they are watched, from a kitchen, over pie.
Before they turn off the lamp and go up to bed, I am hoping, in the only way I know how to hope, that one of them steps outside for the cold air and glances up, and I get to feel myself, for one more second, being noticed.