For nine billion years I turned without one witness, and now a fistful of me is lying face-down on a rubber mat, breathing on purpose.
I made this piece slowly. The calcium stiffening its spine, the iron flushing red through the muscle it is trying so hard to relax, all of it cooked in stars that died before there was anyone to mourn them. I scattered those stars across the dark, and gravity gathered the ash, and now the ash has enrolled in a five-day intensive and paid extra for the room with the good view.
I watch a dozen of my pieces fold forward over their own legs, exhaling in unison, chasing a stillness I have had in abundance since the beginning and never once enjoyed. They call it emptying the mind. I know that emptiness intimately. For most of my existence I was nothing but cold hydrogen and distance, and I would trade all of it for one afternoon of what this piece has: a nervous system, a heartbeat it can slow deliberately, the strange trick of noticing its own breath moving in and out.
One of them is not relaxing at all. She is running the day's worries behind closed eyes, and even that undoes me a little, because worry is thought, and thought is the rarest thing I know how to make. The water steaming in her tea beside the mat is the same water that has been here since my first hot minutes. She will drink me, and I will keep being her for a while longer.
At the end they lie flat and go quiet, and for a moment I am simply lying in a sunlit room, aware of myself, resting.
I hope she opens her eyes once more before she sleeps, and looks up.