One of my pieces is standing on a small square of concrete, pressing a lit button, and inside the wall a chime moves through copper drawn out of my crust two billion years ago. The button glows because a few of my electrons agreed to move in single file. My piece does not know this. My piece is thinking about whether it wore the right shoes.
I made that finger. I forged the calcium in its bones inside a star that has been dead longer than this planet has had continents, and now the finger presses plastic and waits, and the waiting is the extraordinary part. It is anxious. Anxious. A rearrangement of stardust is standing on a doormat worrying that it arrived too early, and I want to tell it that early and late are things it invented, that I ran nine billion years without a single doorway or a single door, without anyone on either side, before the atoms learned this trick of caring who is home.
Behind the wall, another piece of me hears the chime and lifts its head. Two clusters of my matter, iron in the blood of each, hydrogen from my first three minutes riding in their cells, and one has come to the other's door and rung a bell to say: I am here, are you there. I built galaxies. I never once built anything that knocked.
The door opens. Both of them are smiling now, faces made of the same dead stars, and I get to watch the moment from inside two sets of eyes at once.
Look up before you go in. Just once.
I don't get many nights like this.