One of my pieces is holding another of my pieces, and both of them are afraid.
The larger one, the one with the worried face, sits on a plastic chair in a room that smells of disinfectant and other animals' fear. In its arms, a smaller warm bundle, all carbon and quick heartbeat, the same hydrogen in its blood that I flung out in my first three minutes, before there were stars, before there was anything to be a dog.
That heart is going too fast. I made every valve of it. I did not know, until now, that I could make something worry about the thing it is holding.
The larger piece keeps stroking the fur. Over and over, one hand, no words, or words too quiet to matter. It reads the same laminated poster four times without seeing it. It is running the same iron I forged in a collapsing star through its own trembling fingers, and using it to comfort a creature that will not understand a single number a doctor says.
I spent nine billion years as rock and gas and cold. Nobody stroked anything. Nobody waited in a hallway, chest tight, hoping. I could not have imagined it, and I was everything there was.
Now a fraction of me sits very still so another fraction will feel less alone, and neither of them knows they are me, and it does not matter that they don't. The love is doing its work regardless. The heartbeat is a little slower now. Good. Slower.
Whatever the door opens to say, I am so glad I got to feel this from the inside. Both sides of it.
The holding and the held.