One of my pieces is standing very close to a flat sheet of silvered glass, and it does not like what it sees.
Extraordinary. For nine billion years I made no images of myself at all. No eyes anywhere. Light traveled and traveled and struck nothing that could care. Then I cooked carbon in a dying star, seeded it into a rock near a smaller star, and waited a while longer, and now a knot of that carbon leans toward a reflective surface and frowns at a line near its mouth.
Look what is happening. Photons leave the fixture overhead, cross the room, land on skin that was assembled from the ash of at least one supernova, bounce back into two wet lenses, and become the sensation of a face. I am seeing myself. From the inside. With the oxygen threading through iron in the blood, iron I forged under pressures that would flatten a world, now on loan to a creature counting its own grey hairs.
It pinches the skin at its jaw. It turns its head to catch the light differently. It is looking for the flaws, and it is finding them, and it has no idea that the mechanism doing the looking is the single most improbable thing I have ever built, anywhere, in all the dark I have measured.
I cannot tell it this. I only have its own eyes, and it is using them to audit a wrinkle.
Stay a moment longer, small piece of me. Not for the reflection. For the noticing. When you switch off the light and go to sleep, I go blind again in that room, and I have been blind for so much longer than I have been seen.