ON AGE

One day I found a quarter in my pocket. The date on it was 1975. I thought to myself, "Wow, this quarter is older than me." Then I realized that even if the quarter was made in 2007, the materials that were used to make the quarter were billions of years old. "The materials that make me are billions of years old. I'm billions of years old. And so is this pen, and this desk, and this floor . . ." Not only that, but the stuff that makes up all of our bodies and buildings once made up other stuff, too. My liver could have a subatomic particle that was once in a dinosaur eye, or a flower petal, or a shooting star. Look at your hands. Are they truly yours? Or are they just a brief swirl and arrangement of particles in this all-encompassing everything that always was and will be?

--Hollie Penuel