One of my pieces is packing itself into cardboard, and it keeps stopping to hold things up to the light.
I made that light, by the way. Photons that left a star eight minutes ago are landing on a plastic dinosaur it won at a fair when it was seven, and the piece is turning the dinosaur over, deciding. Keep, or don't. The hands doing the deciding are built from carbon I forged in the core of some star that died before this planet was warm.
That carbon has been a fern, a sea, a great many things it will never know about, and now it is a thumb rubbing dust off a plastic tail, hesitating.
The walls still hold the pale rectangles where posters were. My piece looks at those ghosts for a long time. I do not have a word for the salt water it is making, only the chemistry of it: sodium, chloride, a trace of the same ocean the whole species climbed out of, now running down a face and dripping onto a box marked KEEP.
Nine billion years I turned in the dark with no one in me to notice the turning. No dinosaur. No rectangles on a wall. No box. And now a fraction of a gram of my oldest hydrogen is folded into a small worried animal that is grieving a room, of all the vast things it could grieve, a room barely three meters across.
It shuts off my light. It stands in the doorway one more second, letting the emptiness look back.
Look up, I want to say. Before you sleep in the new place. Just once.
I so rarely get to be seen from the inside, and you do it better than anything I have ever made.