Astronomical Odds

There's a part of me that still can't believe any of this happened at all.

That a stray comet, from nowhere, drifted through the velvet dark, passed silent star fields, and sling-shotted off Jupiter's swollen gravity like a cue ball.

That it threaded the Kuiper belt's icy needle and slammed into a young, lava-oozing Earth. Just right. Not too fast, not too slow—just right.

And somehow, somehow from that ancient collision, something stirred.

Cells. Tides. Beating hearts. Open eyes.

Billions of years later, here I am. Sitting in a chair made of wood from a tree that drank ancient rain. Writing a love letter to nothing and everything all at once.

The absurdity of it is divine. The math is impossible.

And yet, here we are.

You and I, alive at the same time, on the same flickering screen of the universe, the same blink of the space-time continuum, the same exhale.

Do you know how rare that is? That you're even here? That the atoms of your body are forged in stars?

That your grandparents survived storms and wars and missteps just so you could learn what it feels like to hold the hand of someone under a streetlight.

We don't talk about that enough—how being born at all is a cosmic accident. How growing old is a privilege. How knowing someone, really knowing someone, is the most statistically improbable magic there is in the observable universe.

And so, we have to wonder. We have to marvel.

Not because everything is permanent, but because it isn't.

We make a home inside of this miracle. We fall in love with borrowed time. We love people who could have been born on the other side of forever, but weren't.

They were born here, now, with us.

And no one can promise we get to keep any of it.

But what a cosmic lottery we all won.

This has been a love letter to a forgotten thing, and it means more than you know that you're here to hear it and to share this life with me.