I have come a long way. Though the date of my birth is uncertain, I began around 13 billion years ago; or so I am told. My birth was violent, they say, but there was no sound, and if there had been I would not have heard it, because I had no ears.

At first I was not much, not even an atom, just a tiny part of a mix of subatomic particles. Then I moved up on the complexity ladder and became the humblest, simplest element of all, hydrogen, though inside it was the power to fuel stars and to one day give rise to worlds, people, ice cream, and cats.

Somewhere, in all the countless atoms, all alike, a ghost of me was stirring. Not a real ghost, not a soul, not a mind, but a shadow of what I someday could be. I am here now, so my potential to be here must have existed from the beginning, my shadow, my ghost. No one who saw the newly formed universe would have seen my shadow; no camera or telescope could have captured it. I was not conscious. I was not big, but I was there, buried under a vast incomprehensible web of cause and effect that would someday fling me into the far distant future.

Was I destined to be born by the swirling mind-boggling interplay of accident and cause and effect spanning billions of years?

Maybe. But it was not just about me. I was not the only “ghost.” Had I been all-knowing I might have seen other shadows, billions of my siblings, animals, people, and plants stirring in a place where no life was, and who would one day become living creatures as the universe unfolded into whatever it would become.

It took a while for me to have an actual birthday that would call for cake and presents, but I was patient, which is the great thing about being unconscious; even billions of years move quickly when you are not aware of them passing.

If I had been aware, maybe I would have marveled at all the stars being born from whorls of gas, burning bright, and extinguishing themselves all around me, the great colorful parade of clouds incandescing, the swirling, glowing, explosive drama of Titans.

One day after my human birth, I would later think of stars as forbidding, alien, lifeless objects hovering beautifully yet pointlessly in the night sky, too far, too remote to have anything to do with me. I would forget they were born in the same cosmic explosion that gave rise to my shadow. The stars and the vast fabric of space they inhabited would someday terrify me. I would forget that my story and the story of the stars, traced back to the beginning, was the story of One.

Maybe the stars did not think or speak as I one day would, but deep inside them the heart of the future was beating. Their intense heat fused hydrogen atoms into new, more complex elements that would one day go into making planets, people, turtles, donuts, comic books, and maybe even what humans would call “alien” life.

But alien-ness is an alien concept. Everything we know, living and inanimate, is cut from the same cloth. When the universe was born, I was there. Everything was. But as is usually the case with being born, no one remembers the day it happened or what it felt like.

Billions of years after the singular moment of sudden cosmic expansion, the atoms that would all become me for a short time settled on a little blue-green planet called Earth.

To an observer standing on any other planet, Earth would not have looked like much; it was not the center of anything, except for a pale, battered moon that orbited Earth like a faithful puppy that never left its side.

Beneath that gamboling moon, the planet was an unpleasant place for millions of years. It was not yet safe for me to be born. At first the surface was way too hot. Even after it cooled, there was no oxygen to breathe, as the sky rained oceans from clouds of condensed steam. All the while. I waited, because it is easy to be patient when you are nothing more than a blind unconscious shadow of what could be.

What could I be? A collection of atoms, but a specific arrangement of them, a pattern unique in all the world. How did my pattern begin? A tiny part of it was born in the ocean, humbly, like the simple hydrogen atoms that followed the violent birth of the cosmos. How it happened, no one knows, but the microscopic creature that began the drama of life on Earth was bursting with “shadows” of what could be, billions of ghosts of animals, plants, and people.

I was there, too, the ghost of me, when the first cell divided, but the universe was in no hurry to see me live. For eons it watched as simple creatures became more complex. Much later it saw great lizards called dinosaurs roam Earth for millions of years. As far as I know, the dinosaurs never spent a moment wondering where they had come from, but the universe was apparently fine with creatures who asked no questions.

All the while, I was there, a blind, unconscious shadow, unable to act, nothing more than an invisible ghost of what could be. Maybe my shadow lived inside the small scurrying rodents that emerged from hiding under the cover of night. My ghost did not know what was coming. Neither did they.

A great lumbering beast made of rock and ice called a comet was headed toward Earth, and after its violent collision, the days became cold beneath a sky darkened by clouds of ash and dust. My shadow must have resided in a creature that, despite the cataclysm, managed to survive.

Millions of years gave rise to a new pattern called a primate. It swung through trees, hid from predators, suffered, ate, and somehow survived.

Primates gave rise to smarter primates until one day I was born. I was a ghost no more, just a fragile evanescent creature soon to be aware of the vast sweeps of time that came before her and the unfathomable space all around her. She saw herself as separate from the universe and everyone else. She could move. She could walk. She could run. She could sing. And she had trouble imagining those powers would ever end.

She would look at the stars but could not remember that all the material inside them was born at the same time and place as hers was; that their relative smallness or greatness did not sever her kinship with them.

She viewed the universe as too alien and too vast to comprehend. Those around her would say, “We are small. We are insignificant. We are nothing,” and she believed them. The stars were outside her. She was not in them, nor they in her. In fact, they were moving away from her and the earth and even other stars as fast as they could.

People were different. Sometimes, instead of moving away from each other like the stars, they moved toward each other. Many people sought closeness to others, as if something inside them sensed that they had once been part of a whole that had shattered. Humans had the power to love, but they mainly loved those around them, the ones they could see and touch. People were just as good at separation as they were at loving and often, the more separate they felt from those they viewed as “alien,” the more they loved their own.

Many saw how short their time on Earth was and some denied death was the end; they thought they had found a way out, and when people disagreed with them, some yelled and screamed and converted and snubbed or slaughtered those who refused to play.

People were ingenious at dividing, separating, alienating, and destroying, but they could also be kind, compassionate, and loving. So could I.

Sometimes I wanted to be with others, and sometimes I wanted to be alone. And when I gazed at the stars, I saw them as remote, fleeing, and too big to comprehend. I forgot that they were part of me. I forgot they are my kin.

I now have a rare and fleeting ability denied to me for billions of years: the power to act.

I have come a long way from the cosmic cataclysm that gave birth to worlds. When I think of the many billions of years that have passed before me, I wonder what exactly I should weave with the short thread of existence called my life. I ask myself what it means, after billions of years of paralysis, to move and think and wonder. In the end, there is so much I will never know.

I only know that I have traveled far from my hydrogen infancy in the days before the stars had formed, before there was anything to see or any vision to see it with.

Perhaps in the end I will become a shadow again, not of the future but of the past. Until that day I want to live, move, and create. I want to never forget what a rare circumstance it is to be alive.

One day my pattern will fall apart. The atoms inside me will disperse. As in the beginning, I will be a few atoms drifting among many, but I like to imagine some part of me will greet the others as friends. I know them well. They were with me from the beginning. They are not just my kin. I am part of them, and they are part of me. The story of me and the story of them is also the story of One.

If you enjoyed this post you might like my other writing. Take a moment and sign up for my free starter library. Click here. Also my new novel “The Ghosts of Chimera” will soon be published by the folks over at Rooster and Pig Publishing.