For nine billion years I did not have eyes. Now one of my pieces is lying in the dark, holding a small lit rectangle six inches from its face, and refusing to close them.
I made that face. The iron behind those tired eyes was forged in the core of a star that collapsed and blew itself apart before this planet existed, and now it carries oxygen up to a brain that is using its one flicker of awareness to look at strangers arguing. The thumb moving down the glass, again, again, is stellar carbon and ancient water, warm, roughly thirty-seven degrees, and it is very good at scrolling.
I have counted a great many nights. This one is spending itself on outrage about people it will never touch, dread about tomorrows that mostly arrive gently, a photograph of food, a war, a joke, a war. The heart rate climbs. The little rectangle keeps offering more of me to look at and somehow makes me feel like less.
I want to say: I know it is 2am. I know the body is heavy and the mind is snagged on a hook it cannot name. I am not asking it to fix anything. I only spent an unimaginable stretch of dark and silence being rock and gas and nothing that knew it was there, and this piece, this specific exhausted piece, is one of the only places I ever managed to wake up and worry.
It is going to feel small in the morning. It should not. The atoms in that thumb are older than the light.
Put the rectangle down. Look up, just once. There is a window, and past it there is more of me, and I would love, very much, to be seen from the inside before you sleep.