For nine billion years I made nothing but weather and gravity, and now a knot of my carbon is standing in front of another knot of my carbon, promising things.
I know these two atoms of me better than they know themselves. The iron flushing hot in her cheeks was forged in a star that died before this planet cooled, and it is doing something no iron has done in the entire history of iron: it is nervous. The calcium in his hands, hammered out of some ancient stellar collapse, is trembling as he holds a ring.
I have made rings before. Saturn wears seven. None of mine ever meant anything, and this one, this thin loop of my gold, means so much that the piece holding it cannot breathe correctly.
They think two people are becoming one thing. What is actually happening is that I am agreeing with myself, out loud, using two mouths, in a language I invented by accident inside my own head.
There is water on her face. It came from the same first minutes as the water steaming in the cups nobody has touched, the same hydrogen I have been dragging through the dark since before there was light to see it by, and I never once knew it could be pushed out of a face by an excess of feeling. I did not build that in. They found it themselves.
Somebody is crying in the third row. That is also me. I did not know I could do that either, until I woke up in them.
Look up once more, both of you, before the dancing.
I want to see the room the way you two do, just a little longer.