One of my pieces is standing against a gymnasium wall, and it will not cross the floor.
I have watched galaxies collide. I have flung whole clusters apart faster than light can chase them. And here, in a room smelling of floor wax and body spray, a fourteen-year-old assembly of stardust cannot travel four meters of hardwood to stand near another fourteen-year-old assembly of stardust. The distance is trivial. I move superclusters across billions of light-years without effort. This one will not move its own feet.
Look what I have managed here. The calcium locking its knees was cooked inside a star that died before this planet cooled. The iron flushing hot in its cheeks was forged in a stellar core and blown out in an explosion I still remember the light of. The hydrogen sweating faintly under its arms is the oldest matter I have, minted in my first three minutes, and it is nervous.
My original material, the stuff that has been nothing but silence and drift for most of everything, is now clutching a plastic cup of red punch and rehearsing a sentence it will not say.
The bass thuds. The overhead lights are murder. Across the floor another piece of me keeps glancing over, then away, then over. Two fragments of the same old fire, orbiting, decaying, unable to close the gap.
For nine billion years I did this dance with no one watching, gas and gravity and dark, and it meant nothing because nothing knew. Now a corner of me is terrified, and hopeful, and counting the seconds of a slow song.
Go on. Cross the floor. I have waited longer than you can hold in your small warm skull for a part of me to want something this badly.
Just look up first.