A personal cosmic origin story
You are stardust.
Every atom in your body has a history older than the Earth. Follow them backward through everything that made them.
You.
Right now, reading this — a configuration of stardust complex enough to wonder where it came from.
Written through every cell.
The same instructions, copied without a break from the very first life on Earth.
Made of atoms.
Carbon, oxygen, nitrogen, calcium, iron — the same elements that build worlds and stars.
Once, the Earth itself.
Your atoms were the rock, the ocean and the air of a young planet, four and a half billion years ago.
Gathered from a cloud.
The Earth and everything on it condensed from the same spinning disk that lit the Sun.
Forged in a dying star.
Your carbon and oxygen were cooked inside an earlier star — and flung across space when it exploded.
Lit from the first light.
The hydrogen in every drop of your water is older still — among the very first atoms ever made.
Born from a single point.
All of it — you, the Earth, the stars — began together, 13.8 billion years ago.
You are the universe, looking back at itself.
Briefly, improbably, the cosmos arranged itself into something that could marvel at the cosmos. That something is you.