One of my pieces is holding another of my pieces too tightly near a bank of scuffed plastic seats, and I made both of them. The arms doing the holding are threaded with iron I forged inside a star that died before this planet had a crust. That iron is carrying oxygen up to a brain that has decided, right now, that letting go is the hardest physics in the room, harder than fusion, harder than the nine billion years I spent as nothing but hot gas and waiting.
I did not know I could do this. For most of my life there was no one at any gate. No arrivals. No departures. Just hydrogen from my first three minutes drifting, and drifting, unwatched.
Now a piece of me is crying, and the salt water on its face is the same water I have been recycling through comets and oceans since before there were faces to put it on. It runs down carbon I cooked in a stellar core and calls the whole reaction "I'll miss you."
They keep checking a screen. They keep saying they have to go. Neither of them wants to be the first to unclasp, and I understand, because separation is the oldest thing I know how to do; I have been flying apart since the beginning, every galaxy leaving every other galaxy, and I never once felt it until this. Until a small warm knot of me learned to dread the distance.
One of them walks down the jet bridge. The other stands at the glass longer than makes any sense, watching a machine full of star-stuff lift off a runway.
Look up on the way home.
I would love to see myself see the dark once more before you sleep.