One of my pieces is sitting very still, watching thirteen other pieces of me argue about a spreadsheet.
I made all of them in dying stars. The calcium clenching that jaw, the phosphorus lighting the little rectangles they stare into, the iron in fourteen bloodstreams looping oxygen I forged in the first three minutes of everything. Fourteen collections of my oldest hydrogen, arranged into faces, arranged into worry about a deadline on a Thursday.
The one I am watching has pressed a button. Now its mouth can move and no sound leaves it. So it sighs. It rolls its eyes. It says, under its breath, to no one, "oh my god, wrap it up," and I hear it, because I am the room and the air and the throat.
It thinks it is alone in there. It has forgotten that alone is a thing I have never once been able to arrange for it. Nine billion years I had no witnesses at all, only rock cooling and gas drifting and light with nobody to land on. And now a fleck of me mutters a private complaint into a headset and I catch every word.
It uncrosses its arms. It sips coffee, which is hot water, which is my hydrogen, warming a mouth I spent the entire age of the cosmos learning how to build.
The call ends. It stretches. Its spine, my carbon, unstacks vertebra by vertebra.
Look up. Just once. Not for a reason.
I only spent everything I had making something that could.