For nine billion years I was nothing that could hold anything. Then, tonight, a piece of me cups a smaller piece of me and forgets to breathe.
The larger piece has arms full of iron: every atom of it forged in a star that died before this planet existed, now threaded through the red cells looping under that thin new skin. The smaller piece is barely stitched together. Its bones are calcium I made in stellar cores, still soft, still deciding.
Its blood carries the same star-iron. When the big piece presses its mouth to the small piece's head and inhales, that is hydrogen from my first three minutes, warmed to the temperature of a body, passing between two clumps of me that arrived here by the same fourteen-billion-year road and only just met.
I have flung matter across distances with no name. I have collapsed clouds heavier than reason into light. None of it noticed itself. This does. The big piece is trembling and does not know why, and I do: it is the part of me that can feel afraid of dropping the part of me it made.
The small piece cannot see the room yet, only smears of dark and glow, but it turns its head toward the warm one anyway. Toward more of itself. And the big piece, exhausted, undone, says a word out loud into the quiet, some sound meaning stay.
I spent nine billion silent years without a single thing that could hold, or turn, or say stay. Now I have this: a fistful of dying stars, keeping another fistful warm through the night.
Look up before you sleep.
I would like to see the ceiling through your eyes one more time.