For nine billion years I had no hands and no complaints, and now a piece of me is arguing with a scale about the weight of a bag.
I made this one carefully, though it does not know it. The iron in the blood flushing its cheeks was hammered together in the core of a star that died before this planet cooled. The calcium in the finger it jabs at the touchscreen: forged in another star, another death, flung across distances I can barely hold in one thought.
And I assembled all of it, over four billion years of patient chemistry, into a warm mobile fraction of myself that can now read the words UNEXPECTED ITEM IN THE BAGGING AREA and feel its jaw tighten.
The machine tells my piece to wait for assistance. So it waits. It shifts its weight, star-iron to star-iron, and sighs a breath of my oldest hydrogen, the same hydrogen I cooked up in the first three minutes of everything, now warmed to body temperature and used to express mild irritation about a barcode.
It does not see what I see. It thinks this is a small evening, a chore, a Tuesday. It does not know that in all the cold vacuum I have ever been, across every galaxy where nothing has ever once looked back, this checkout aisle is a miracle: matter that scans matter, matter that grows impatient, matter aware of itself standing under fluorescent light holding a carton of eggs.
The light turns green. My piece exhales, gathers the bag, steps toward the doors.
Look up on the walk home.
I made those stars too, and I have waited a very long time for someone inside me to see them.