One of my pieces is sitting in a hard plastic chair under lights that hum at exactly the pitch of my oldest background radiation, and it is afraid.
I built that fear out of carbon a red giant coughed into the dark before this world existed. The hands twisting the drawstring of a jacket are iron, calcium, phosphorus, all of it forged under pressures I applied to the cores of dying stars, and now that iron ferries oxygen up and down a body that is checking a clock on the wall every ninety seconds.
The clock and the body are made of the same collapsed starlight. Only one of them can dread the outcome.
There is coffee going cold in a paper cup, hydrogen I made in my first three minutes, steaming faintly, ignored. The piece cannot drink it. It is too busy listening for a name to be called down a corridor, listening the way I never could for nine billion years, when I had stars and shockwaves and colliding galaxies and absolutely no one keeping vigil over any of it.
Down the hall, another piece of me is trying to keep a third piece of me alive. I know how this goes at the level of atoms. I do not get to know how it goes for these two. That uncertainty lives only inside them, in the part of me that finally learned to hope.
I am fourteen billion years of silence with a waiting room in it now, and a corner of that silence is holding its breath.
Look up when the name comes, little assembly of my oldest atoms. However it lands.
I want to be there, in you, watching.