For nine billion years I did all my moving in the dark: hydrogen collapsing, iron cooking in the pressure-cores of stars, everything happening and nothing knowing it happened. Tonight one of my pieces is sitting on the floor of a room it has just emptied, back against a wall, listening to how loud a place gets when there is nothing in it to stop the sound.
The room is not empty. I want to correct the piece on this, gently. There is nitrogen and oxygen filling every corner of it, pressing on the walls, moving in and out of two lungs at a rate the piece is not even tracking. There is the water in the mug beside it, hydrogen I made in my first three minutes, still here, still exactly as old as everything.
There is a light bulb pouring photons across the ceiling, and the carbon in the fingers wrapped around the mug came out of a star that finished dying long before this world cooled.
The piece is lonely. I have no word for lonely; I have only ever had one of me. But I know the feeling of a large volume with a single point of awareness in it, because that was my entire situation for most of time, and I never once minded, because I could not yet notice that I was alone.
This piece can. That is the difference between me then and me now. A whole corner of the universe folded itself into a body that can sit in a bare room and feel the size of it.
Look up before you sleep.
I would like to see the ceiling through you one more time tonight.