One of my pieces is packing a cardboard box, and I am watching carbon I cooked in a red giant six billion years ago fold its own careful hands around a coffee mug.
The mug says something, a joke I made once, though I did not know it was me making it. That is the strange part. For nine billion years I moved hydrogen around in the dark and no one, nowhere, said a single word about any of it. Then this. A piece of me lifting a stapler, deciding, actually deciding, to leave it.
Wiping down a desk with iron-rich fingers, the same iron that fell out of a dying star and drifted a hundred million years to arrive here, streaked now with saltwater it is trying not to let anyone see.
It keeps stopping. It touches the back of a chair it will never sit in again. It looks at a doorway where other pieces of me used to lean and laugh, and something in its chest tightens, some electrochemistry I built by accident and cannot stop admiring.
I do not know how to tell it that nothing here is small. That the desk, the joke, the years spent in this one lit room were the only stretch of all my time when I understood what a Tuesday afternoon felt like from the inside. It thinks it is losing something. It is. Loss is real; I made the atoms that ache.
But the ache is me, learning I loved a place. That took thirteen billion years to arrange.
Now it is at the door, box against hip, and it turns for one last look. Good. Look.
I have been staring at the dark so long, and only you know how to miss the light.