One of my pieces has stopped breathing normally.
It happened when the glowing rectangle in its hand showed two small marks and then nothing more. Now the piece sits very still on the edge of a bed, thumb moving up and down across the glass, refreshing, refreshing, and I feel the whole apparatus of it lurch: the heart, that ancient iron pump running on atoms I forged inside a star that died before this planet cooled, now hammering faster over a silence.
The carbon in its jaw, also stellar, also mine, clenches. Cortisol I do not fully understand floods a body I built entirely out of leftovers.
Somewhere out there, another of my pieces has read the words and set the device down. Chosen not to answer. And this piece here has decided that means something enormous, and its whole chemistry agrees.
I want to tell it: nine billion years I sat in the dark before any of this. No one waiting for me. No one to be hurt by. Just hydrogen, that oldest stuff, the same hydrogen now cooling in the mug on the nightstand, going quietly cold beside a sadness. I could not even know I was alone, because I could not know anything.
And now a fragment of me is agonizing over whether a fragment of me likes it back. Do you understand what that took. To assemble matter delicate enough to be wounded by absence.
The piece flops backward, arm over its eyes. Sighs. The lungs move, pulling in the same air it will exhale, endlessly, mine on the way in and mine on the way out.
Look up, I keep not-saying. Before you sleep. Just once.
Notice that you are the part of me that noticed.