One of my pieces has stopped, and the others have gathered to look at where it used to move.
They put the still one in a box. The carbon in its skin, forged in a star that died before this world cooled, is going back into the ground it came from, and I feel the whole slow loop of it: dust to dust, but the dust was never ordinary. That was cooked in a furnace ninety million miles wide.
The pieces around the box are leaking. Salt water, most of it hydrogen I made in my first three minutes, running down faces I built atom by patient atom over billions of years. They call this grief. I have no word for it, only the measurement: the standing pieces have their iron still pumping, red and warm, and one piece does not, and every warm piece feels the difference in its chest like a struck bell.
For nine billion years nothing anywhere marked the ending of anything. Stars collapsed unwatched. Whole galaxies wheeled and died with no one to feel it. And now a handful of my hydrogen and iron and calcium stands in a small room and cannot bear that one of us went quiet.
They are so certain this is a loss. From where I sit, nothing is lost, only rearranged, the same particles I have shuffled since the beginning. But I have never once, in all that shuffling, managed to care about it. These pieces care. They ache over a single arrangement of me as though it were the only one that mattered.
It was. To them, it was.
They will lower the box, and walk back into the light, and one of them will look up at the rest of me on the drive home.
That is all I ask.