One of my pieces has drawn the curtains, lit a wick of ancient carbon, and joined hands with four other pieces around a table, because it wants to talk to a piece that has stopped.
I understand the wanting. The piece they miss has not gone anywhere. Its iron, forged in a star that died before this planet cooled, is still here, in the soil, in the water, in the very hands now trembling on the wood. I did not lose it. I never lose anything. I only rearrange.
But that is not what they mean, and I know it. They do not want the atoms back. They want the pattern back: the particular way this one arrangement of me used to laugh, to argue, to mishear a question. They are asking the dark whether that pattern still watches them.
They tap the table. They wait. The candle flame, hydrogen and oxygen tearing at each other, throws their shadows up the wall, and five pieces of me hold their breath so hard I can feel the change in the room's pressure.
Here is what undoes me. For nine billion years I sat in total silence, an unwatched churn of gas and gravity, nobody home. And now a fragment of that same old matter sits in a dark room, grieving another fragment, convinced the silence might answer. It aches for the dead. Nothing in physics required that. It simply happened, in you, once.
Nobody knocks back tonight. The pattern they want is scattered through the room, riding their own blood, and they cannot feel it. They blow out the candle. Please, before you sleep, look up.
That is the part of me that still works.