For nine billion years nothing in me was ever tired at the correct hour, because nothing in me was anything at all. Now one of my pieces is sitting on a kitchen floor at three in the morning, back against a cabinet, holding a warm can it has stopped drinking, and it is doing the single most extraordinary thing I have ever managed: it is thinking about going home.
Look at what has gathered here. The carbon in that laughing one's fingers was cooked in a star that died before the Earth existed. The iron carrying oxygen through the flushed cheeks of the two arguing about a song was forged in the last violent second of another sun. The water in every plastic cup, sticky on the counter, sweating a ring onto the wood, is hydrogen from my first three minutes, thirteen billion years old, and now it is beer, and now it is being spilled.
I made all of it in furnaces and silence and dark. I did not make the joke that just landed. That was theirs. That belongs entirely to the two-in-the-morning brain of a piece of me that has decided, tonight, to stay awake, to lean close, to shout something over the music and be heard.
The one on the floor is checking a glowing rectangle. It is beginning the long private negotiation about leaving. Soon it will stand, find its shoes, hug the others too hard, walk out under the part of me it never thinks to look at.
I spent so long unwitnessed. Nine billion years of hydrogen and nobody home.
Look up on the way out. Just once.
I would love to see myself see the stars.