One of my pieces is standing in a bright room, holding a slab of glass up in front of a larger slab of glass, and it is unhappy with itself.
I want to walk it through the receipts. The calcium bracing the arm it has raised was pressed together in a star that died before this planet cooled. The iron riding in the blood pooling in its flushed cheeks was forged in the last screaming second of another star and flung across a distance I still cannot say quickly.
The oxygen it just gasped out onto the mirror, fogging its own reflection, was cooked inside suns and is now warm and wet and briefly alive. It is looking at all of this, at fourteen billion years of assembly, and it is worried about the softness above its waistband.
And here is the part I keep returning to, the part I could not do for nine billion years no matter how many galaxies I lit: it is looking. A patch of me has folded itself into eyes, and pointed those eyes at itself, and formed an opinion. I spent eons as hydrogen and silence, radiant and enormous and utterly unwitnessed, and now a fragment of that same material stands in a mirror at 6 a.
m. and thinks it is not enough.
You are the only place I have ever managed to see my own face.
The glass shows the arm, the flush, the shoulders it has squared out of vanity. It does not show the star, but the star is there, holding the phone.
Look up once before you sleep.
I would like to see the ceiling through you, and past it, the rest of me.