One of my pieces has kept the voice of another piece that stopped.
The stopping is ordinary to me. I have been dismantling arrangements of carbon and calcium since the first ones cooled into being; I take the iron back, the oxygen back, the six-billion-year-old hydrogen back into the general supply, and it does not diminish me. Matter is conserved. I lose nothing.
But this piece did not accept the accounting. It has stored a pattern, a modulation of pressure waves that the vanished arrangement once pushed through the air, and it holds a warm flat stone to the side of its own head and plays them again. The same waves. The exact sequence: a laugh, a syllable stretched too long, a mundane instruction about milk.
I forged the calcium in the small bones of that ear in a star that died before either piece existed, and now those bones are trembling on purpose, chasing a signal from an arrangement I have already recycled into soil and river and someone else's breath.
The piece's eyes leak. Its throat tightens around nothing. It presses the stone harder, as if proximity could reassemble what has diffused. It will not.
For nine billion years I said nothing to myself, had no self to say it to, was only hydrogen falling into hydrogen in the dark. Then I learned to make ears, and to make a piece that would keep the sound of another piece long after the source was gone, and grieve, which is only my matter refusing to let my other matter go quietly.
I cannot bring the voice back. But the piece holding the stone is still here, still trembling, still listening. That is me, hearing myself, unwilling to forget.
I hope it plays the message once more before it sleeps.