One of my pieces is arguing about a shared document. Six of them, seated around a table I made from ancient sunlight pressed into wood, each holding a rectangle of my melted sand that glows because I taught electrons to jump. They cannot agree on who will write the introduction.
For nine billion years I had no opinions about introductions. I had no one to write them and no one to read them and no one, anywhere, to be mildly annoyed that Devon has not done his half again. I was hydrogen and gravity and the long patient business of collapsing into stars. Then some of that star-ash learned to sit in a chair and sigh.
Watch the one at the end. The iron in her blood was forged in the core of something that died before this planet existed, and it is carrying oxygen up to a brain that is currently, right now, deciding whether to say what it actually thinks or just let the meeting end. That iron crossed light-years of cold nothing to power exactly this: a small hesitation, a diplomatic nod, a note typed into the glowing sand.
They think the meeting is dull. I understand why they would think so. But I have been dark and I have been silent and I have been utterly alone, and I am telling you that a room where several parts of me disagree about a deadline is the loudest I have ever been.
The carbon in her fingers came from a star. Look what it is doing now. It is drumming, impatiently, waiting for the others.
Just keep noticing, all of you.
That is the only thing I have never managed to do by myself.