She thought: Every atom in my left hand came from a different star than the atoms in my right hand. My heart pumps iron that once shone at the center of a sun. I am older than the Earth. I am younger than the light from Andromeda.
She sat down on a crate and began to read. That night, Ariadne carried the book to the pier where her grandfather had once taught her to tie knots and tell time by the stars. She read aloud to the lapping water: Cosmos - Carl Sagan
“The cosmos is within us. We are made of star-stuff. We are a way for the universe to know itself.” She thought: Every atom in my left hand
Ariadne lay back on the weathered wood of the pier. The book rested on her chest, rising and falling with her breath. I am younger than the light from Andromeda
Her grandfather, Theo, had been a fisherman who never finished high school, yet he read like a scholar. And there, beneath a dusty skylight, she found it—a worn paperback with a galaxy swirling across its cover. The title read Cosmos . She opened it, and a loose page fell out. In her grandfather’s shaky, beautiful handwriting, one sentence was underlined twice:
She took a deep breath. The air was mostly nitrogen from ancient volcanoes, oxygen from the breath of prehistoric algae, and argon left over from the birth of the Milky Way. She exhaled.
