IT COULD have been a Tuesday or a Friday when we were sitting at opposite sides of the theatre and our professor mentioned something that was later to give me a revelation. Elements, he said, of atomic numbers greater than that of Hydrogen's or Helium's could not have been produced during the Big Bang. These other elements, basically forming everything around us, they could have only been cooked up inside the furnaces of stars, through nuclear reactions billions and billions of years in the past. Carbon, Nitrogen, Oxygen, Potassium, Sodium, Magnesium, the things that make up our bodies and we ourselves, we were material from dead stars. At that moment, I felt a kind of elation; I found another thing that I have in common.with you.

I guess I liked it. Our Physics class, I mean. There we had maybe a glimpsing of all the fiery explosions, black holes, red shifts and expansions, births and deaths of quasars, planetary attractions and collisions ever to have occurred. And even if I know that these things are far removed from our concerns now, I might think that these occasions marked all that was ever important to the life of the universe. Sometimes, just imagining these events while looking up at the sky could shake me; everything that was ever anything spinning and spinning in the sky at dazzling moments; endless bodies of matter igniting as suns to endless numbers of galaxies like ours; space and time expanding at speeds faster than light to make everything farther apart; and our outer space could have once been yellow, then orange, then red, then a deeper red finally becoming cold and black as it is now. But then, coming home from class, I might happen to ride the same jeep as you and perhaps exchange a couple of words with you and I would, in an instant, be filled with the same sense of wonder.

So I would wonder why that is. Don't laugh; maybe it's not so simple as me liking you, wanting to just march up to that store near the Third World Library to see you there, (you might be in the midst of reading a humorous book, something would tell you to look up, maybe the wind—it would be a windy afternoon and strands of your hair would start distracting you from reading page 83, you would look up—and then, there I would be, a couple of steps just in front, looking as lost as ever, maybe paler than usual). I would take a deep breath and then I would tell you.

"Remember that thing our professor told us, about the stars? Well, I'll believe it. I'll believe it because before this semester, before our Nat. Sci. 1 class, I know I've never seen you before in my life. Yet, there really is this growing, growing sense in me and it tells me that I've been with you long before we've met." (Maybe, if you're cynical, you might say that nobody really believes in reincarnations anymore. Or maybe you would ask me if it's just a line I'm telling you; and a bad line at that. But I don't think you are cynical—at least not wholly. And I'm not talking about reincarnations).

"Quanta", I would say. It's even more puzzling when we come to the things that make us up. We are bags of protons and electrons, leptons, gluons and quarks, coming from the Big Bang, coming from all the cores of stars, dispersed in space, swimming through all the billion years, finding ourselves where we are now. "You and I have crossed paths again. Maybe I was close to you even when we were still in the deeper parts of a star. There could have been just two quantum particles, one point of you and another of me, momentarily coming into contact and I would have already liked you then. So now, we're actually nearing each other once more and that part of me is saying it's a miracle."

Of course, I could never prove it; not to you and not even to myself. Leptons and gluons and stars and the Big Bang, well, these really are just names. And I'd never be able to look into my atoms to see which quantum is saying you're familiar or if we did meet once, long ago. So, these are all just dreams.

And that's why it's not so simple as me liking you, wanting to just march up to that store near the Third World Library to see you there.

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