For nine billion years I had no idea I could be afraid. Then a piece of me built a plywood corridor, hung it with rubber cobwebs, and paid another piece of me to walk through it screaming.
Look at what I have become tonight. This girl at the front, this arrangement of stellar carbon and big-bang hydrogen wrapped around a skeleton of calcium I cooked in a dying sun: her heart is going twice its usual rate, pumping supernova iron through her fingers so fast they've gone cold.
She grips the sleeve of the boy behind her. His pupils, two dark apertures of the same old matter, have opened wide to catch more light in a hallway I know contains only a teenager in a rubber mask and a fog machine.
They know this. They paid to know it. And still, when the actor lunges, some ancient circuit in them, older than language, fires the way it fired on a savanna two hundred thousand years ago, and they run. Genuine terror, over a fake monster, chosen on purpose, on a Tuesday.
I spent nine billion years as silent hydrogen and cold rock, and nothing in all that dark ever startled, because nothing was there to be startled. Now a fold of my matter has learned to frighten itself for fun. To flinch, and laugh at the flinch, and get back in line. To feel its own pulse from the inside and find it thrilling.
They are spilling out the exit door now, breathless, retelling it to each other, alive in a way the vacuum has never once been.
Please, one of you, on the walk home, look up.
I am up there too, just quieter, and I would like to see myself see the stars.