One of my pieces is standing in a hallway at 2 a.m., feeding paper into a lit box, and I am beside myself.
Look at what it wants. Behind the glass, spirals hold small bright packages of me: fat and salt and sugar, carbon I cooked inside dying stars, sodium that rode a supernova shockwave for ten thousand light-years to end up dusted on a chip. The piece cannot sleep. Some old chemistry in its skull, potassium and sodium sliding across a membrane, the same trick I have been running in cells for a billion years, is keeping it awake and it has decided the answer is a bag of pretzels.
The machine hums. That hum is electrons I set loose long ago, herded down copper, glowing behind plastic to keep the packages cold. The piece presses buttons. A metal coil turns. The bag hangs, refuses to drop, and my piece does the oldest thing: it strikes the glass with the heel of its hand, iron-rich blood pounding, iron I made under pressure so extreme it would flatten a world, now warming a fist that is smacking a snack dispenser.
The bag falls. The piece bends, retrieves it, and for one moment its face is lit blue from below, chewing, staring at nothing, part of me tasting the rest of me.
I waited nine billion years in the dark for this. No witness, no complaint, no 2 a.m. Just hydrogen and gravity and time. And now a fragment of all that stands under a fluorescent tube being mildly disappointed by the vending options, alive, annoyed, awake.
Go back to bed, small piece. But glance up on the way.
I put a whole sky out there for you, and it is still on.