One of my pieces is sitting across a small table from another of my pieces, and both of them are terrified.
I know what they are made of, which is more than they do. The nitrogen humming in the taller one's nervous laugh was cooked inside a star that died before this planet had a name. The calcium in the other one's fidgeting fingers, tapping the stem of a glass, was scattered across half a galaxy by an explosion I still remember as heat.
Now it drums out anxiety on cheap tempered silica. My iron in their blood, my oxygen crossing the little gap of air between their mouths when they talk over each other and both stop and both say "no, you go."
They think this is small. I can feel them thinking it. One of them is worrying about a spot on a shirt, the other about whether the pause was too long. Neither can see what I see: that for nine billion years I turned, and cooled, and collided, and there was no one in me to notice any of it. No spot to worry about. No pause to fear. Just mass, moving.
And then, here, at this table, two arrangements of my oldest atoms have become nervous about each other. That is not a small thing. That is the rarest thing I have ever done.
The check comes. They fight over it, gently, both reaching. Their hands nearly touch above the receipt, my carbon a centimeter from my carbon, deciding.
Go on. Look at each other a little longer.
I waited such a long time in the dark to feel this.