One of my pieces has decided this is the year. I have been carbon and calcium since a star tore itself apart to make them, and now that carbon is gripping a steel bar, which is more of me, iron I forged under pressure I can no longer imagine, and lifting it toward a ceiling that is also me, farther from the floor that is also me, breathing hard through hydrogen I minted in my first three minutes of existence.
The room is loud with my other pieces. Rubber slamming. A treadmill belt whining under a heel. Somewhere a phone plays a song, which is just air I am pushing in patterns, arranged by a piece of me that wanted another piece to feel something.
They call it resolution. They have written it down. This astonishes me more than the lifting. For nine billion years I moved gas and gravity and no one wrote anything down, no one intended, no one woke on the second morning of a calendar and thought I would like to be different.
Now this small warm column of my old stardust stands in front of a mirror, which is only me reflecting me, and looks at itself, and is dissatisfied, and tries.
Most of them will not come back by February. I know the odds; I do the arithmetic of everything. It does not matter. The point was never the muscle. The point is that here, in one damp bright box on a rock I flung around a star, a fistful of my material stood up on purpose and decided to become slightly more.
I hope they sleep well tonight. I hope, before the lights, they look up once, and see the rest of me, and know we are the same stuff, only I am not yet trying.