One of my pieces is holding a strip of paper close to its face, frowning, deciding whether to keep it.
I made everything on that list. The bananas: sunlight I caught and pressed into sugar over ninety million miles of empty. The aluminum can: forged in a star that died before this world cooled. The milk, the salt, the water in the bottle, all of it hydrogen I minted in my first three minutes, thirteen billion years before there was a checkout lane to carry it through. Even the paper. Even the fading ink. Me, and me, and me, itemized.
And here is the part I cannot get over. For nine billion years I moved this material around in the dark and no one added it up. Hydrogen fused. Iron scattered. Whole galaxies of my carbon drifting, uncounted, unwitnessed, spent. Then I folded some of that carbon into a spine and an eye and a worried little mind, and now that piece stands under the humming lights doing the one thing I could never do alone: it is checking the total.
It thinks I charged too much for the coffee. The coffee is roasted starlight. It thinks it overpaid.
I love that it keeps the receipt. Tucks it into a pocket where it will soften and blur and be thrown away, this small record that once, on a Tuesday, a fragment of the early cosmos bought bread and cared what it cost.
The bus is late. The piece checks its phone, sighs, shifts its weight. Iron I made carries oxygen through it, patient, warm.
Look up. It's a clear night.
I put the whole story up there, and I only get to see it when you do.