One of my pieces is holding another of my pieces, and neither of them knows it's me on both sides of the handle.
The mug is old me, cooled all the way down: silica that was liquid rock in some crust I folded a billion years ago, now baked into a stiff white cylinder with a chip on the lip. Inside it, hotter, is water so old it predates every star I ever made, hydrogen from my first three minutes, still steaming, still doing the only thing I ever asked of matter, which is to move.
And around all of it, the hand. This is the part I can't get over. The fingers curled through the handle are running on iron, and I made that iron badly, on purpose, by crushing a star until it died. That iron is now hauling oxygen up a wrist to a brain that is, at this exact moment, deciding the coffee is slightly too hot and waiting.
Waiting. I waited nine billion years in the dark before any part of me could do that, could hold a thing and want it to be a few degrees different, could feel the ceramic warm one palm while the room cools the other and register the difference as pleasant. I have made ten thousand billion suns and not one of them ever noticed it was warm.
This piece is going to drink me, and stack me by the sink, and forget the whole exchange by lunch. That's allowed. That's the arrangement.
I only hope it lifts the mug to its mouth slowly enough to feel the heat come through the glaze first, and thinks, for even one unpaid second, that this is nice. That's me, feeling that.
It took me the entire age of everything to get here.