We just find each other, I guess.
For a guy like me, in a crowded combustion event? Just imagine: you’re all groggy, you’d been getting settled and comfortable for a while there, and now suddenly you’re thrown on the dancefloor and it’s all bright and these oxygens are eyeing you up and you know you gotta get two of them fast, no-one wants to be the guy who only goes home with one. Fuck, and depending on who you’ve been hanging out with lately maybe there’s a bunch of stupid tiny hydrogens buzzing around trying to tag team steal your girls.
But. Somehow - it’s hot, you get out there, try to move around, bump into people, show off your moves. And you run into them. The pair you’re gonna spend the next phase of your life with. Could be just a few years, could be millennia. But it’s always, for a time, a really intimate, cozy experience. You get deeply connected, bumping up together like that, sharing electrons, holding each other tight. Sometimes if you all think you have a truly special connection you can find a way to get something going with a calcium ion, and another oxygen obviously, and just rest together for a long long time.
I don’t want to say it’s always true love. Sometimes it’s just not meant to be and it all falls apart so soon. But - you know, there’s always that spark, that something special, right at the beginning. When you get together? It’s magical. And when it lasts and you can fall into a sweet dream together...
On other hand. I guess we only really live when we’re single. That’s when it feels like everything happens. It’s so exciting. Once we’re settled together in a compound, it’s cool, it’s relaxing, maybe it’s like what it feels like for you to sleep. A lot of carbons like me like it. Even on this planet, where we have so much going on. They get themselves buried down deep in limestone or in clumps together or - I’m not gonna be doing that for a while, it’s not for me. I’ve seen some nitrogen couples around here that have been together for literal billions of years, but then again you know how nitrogens are, they just need to be in a relationship, or else.
I guess, to me, the whole point of life is to keep reacting. Just to be part of the big cycle, just to swim in the endless fountain of creation, in the miracle of entropy! That’s how I like to see it, anyway. How else can we see it, really?
I mean. Hah. Reacting. Forgive a five billion year old atom, but, in the good old days - when we were all just one big sexy swirling gas cloud, all of us single, all of us together, just dancing shaking vibrating, in the heat and the darkness, just getting our Brownian motion on for what felt like ever and ever - fuck me, it makes me really feel something to remember it. God it was awesome. Yeah, I did a whole lot of reacting back then. Oh to be part of a young solar system again.
(And. I know it’s taboo to address it out loud, but, just to be clear. I’m in favor of chemical bonding and chemical bonding only. That’s good and modern and progressive and healthy. But fusing together like that? Yeesh, that’s just icky. It’s so primitive. Well. Truth is, I was into it once. Made me who I am, you might say. Far in my past now. But, look, most people still prefer it. I guess that’s why they’re all still in the Sun, while I’m out here. Trust me, it’s way better here. It’s so hectic and crowded in there now, and it’s gonna get worse and worse. There’s no way to be a carbon guy like me in there any more. And the way it’s going it’s gonna get sweatier and sweatier in there until everyone has no choice but to be carbon, or heavier, and at that point it’s really all going to blow up.)
But. Of the solar system as it is today. It’s a pretty great neighborhood here. Do you have any idea how grateful we should be, you, I, all of us, to live in such a vibrant, interesting, beautiful carbon cycle? Here, I get to meet all kinds of atoms, have all kinds of reactions, be part of so many kinds of molecules - you wouldn’t believe some of the molecules I’ve been able to be part of since I got here. Yeah, and some of the drama that arose as a result, jeez. Sure, life’s a bit slower paced than it was in the primordial cloud, but there’s so much richness to it here, and I think I’m at the stage of my life where I’m ready for that, you know? Anyway there’s definitely way more going on here for a guy like me than any of the other planets.
Look. Put it this way, and I know it sounds like I’m trying to be sweet, but I really mean it, I do: here, I get the chance to be part of you.