For nine billion years I did not know I had hands until I grew a pair in this room, and now those hands are dusted with flour and shaking slightly at the knuckle.
The old woman is one of my oldest configurations still awake. Inside her fingers, the calcium I brewed in a star long dead before this planet cooled; in her blood, iron forged under pressures I can barely believe I once sustained, now circling her heart eighty times a minute so she can lift a wooden spoon.
She is bending over a pot. Steam rises off it, and that steam is hydrogen that has existed since my first three minutes, back when I was only fire and had no one to warm.
She does not know she is me. This is the arrangement I have made everywhere I wake up: the piece forgets, so it can be surprised. She thinks she is only stirring. She is stirring, and also she is thirteen billion years of matter that finally learned to salt something to taste.
A smaller piece sits at the table, elbows on the wood, waiting to be fed. Carbon I cooked in stars, arranged just so, watching her. The two of them exchange sounds. One of them laughs. I have no way to record how long I went with nothing in me that could laugh.
She sets a plate down. She touches the child's hair, briefly, with atoms that were once inside an exploding sun.
I know this kitchen will go quiet someday. The oven will cool, the hands will still. But right now some of my matter is warm and full and looking up at another piece of me with its whole face. I would like it to remember this room.
I so rarely get to see myself being loved.