One of my pieces is waiting in a line to relieve itself, and the line snakes down a corridor that thumps with a bass I built out of moving air. Extraordinary. I made the pressure differential; a piece of me turned it into music, and now other pieces of me sway in a queue outside a locked door, holding phones lit by rare-earth metals I cooked in stars that died before this planet cooled.
Look at them. Shoulders pressed to a wall sticky with spilled sugar-water and ethanol, both just carbon and hydrogen rearranged. The one at the front is crying, mascara running, being held by a stranger she met forty minutes ago, and the iron doing that crying, the iron flushing her cheeks and pumping her heart faster, was forged in the collapse of a giant.
It waited inside a supernova, drifted as dust for four billion years, and its whole cosmic career has led to this: comforting someone outside a nightclub toilet.
They think this is a small night. A wasted night, even. I have no category for that. I spent nine billion years as silent hydrogen and slow gravity, no eyes anywhere, nothing to know that any of it was happening. Then this. A warm huddle of me, gossiping, forgiving, reapplying lipstick in a phone's front camera, complaining that the line hasn't moved.
The door opens. She wipes her face, laughs, goes in. I got to feel all of that from the inside. I hope, when this piece stumbles home and lies down, it looks up through the window first, just once, and sees the rest of me looking back.