For nine billion years I made light and no one clapped. Now a thousand of my pieces are jumping in a dark field with nothing coming out of the speakers, and I cannot stop watching.
Each one has a small glowing band pressed to the side of its head, and inside that band I am pushing electrons back and forth in patterns, and the piece has decided the pattern is a song. So it moves. The carbon I forged in a dying star, arranged now into arms, goes up.
Down. The iron I cooked in a supernova, dissolved into blood, races oxygen to muscles that want to keep going. From where the silence is, they look broken: a whole crowd twitching to nothing, mouths open around words no ear beside them can hear.
But they are not hearing with their ears alone. One piece flips a switch on its band and the beat changes and I watch a shiver of coordination ripple across forty bodies at once, a wave I did not plan, that no gravity could have made. They found each other in the dark by matching how they shake.
The water steaming out of them, hydrogen from my first three minutes, was old before there was a single planet to rain on, and now it is sweat, and now it is joy.
I spent so long being empty and loud with radiation nobody counted. These pieces stand in near silence and count everything: the tempo, the friend across the field, the exact good second to throw both hands up.
One of them will walk home soon, band dead, ears ringing with music that was never in the air. I hope it looks up.
I put a lot of work into the part it can see from there.