Stars

So, I've got a new story in mind that deals with the world actually ending in 2012, such that physicists realize that the sun will go out billions of years before they ever expected it to. And as these things often go, when the protagonist realizes she is going to die in less than a year, she makes a number of changes in her life - especially returning to the love of her life, who was both too different and too similar, and such issues had driven them apart. The protagonist is a realist who doesn't believe in magic - and very much believes in the sciences. She considers the man she loves and the way she feels about him in relation to such beliefs:

We were all stars once, and maybe we’re close because we were created in the same star – made up from the same base materials, and maybe we shared some of the same atoms in our make-up in past selves. Atoms probably don’t have memories quite the way one would attribute memory to souls in a past life, but certainly there’s got to be some sort of attraction, some similarity, and maybe in our last life all of the atoms that are in the two of us now were only in one person before, or at least we share some of the same atoms that were in two similar men or women who loved one another. Maybe, at a very basic level, beyond even memory or animalistic desire, there’s some attraction between us, indescribable and unknowable, nearly science but beyond even that.

Perhaps the atoms in our flesh once came from the same star – from the outer material of a neutron star that collapsed, shattering and exploding, sending the heavy atoms at its outer edge deep into space before it darkened, sucking in all light, and became the gaping, infinitely curved space-time that we call a black hole. (maybe we even came from the star that created one of the greatest black holes, the supermassive ones, that exist at the center of galaxies.)

And so we survived the darkness, and the materials that would one day become our physical selves wandered through the universe for hundreds of thousands of years, until atoms came together to beget the earth, and then slowly, eventually, more came together to create life. And that life changed and evolved, sharing atoms and DNA, until we were born, and no lifetime would be sufficient for tracing the long paths our flesh must have taken before it came to be ours.

How did my body, before it was my own, react to your touch, before it was yours? How did we interact, how did the flesh, on an atomic level, interact? How do the elemental particles in our bodies interact when we touch?

I will not call us soul mates, because I do not believe in God or in souls, but I do believe in physics, in the real and the concrete. So I will venture to wonder if we are body mates – mayhap even heart mates, as at least such a term, while metaphorically based in our emotions, stems from a physical part of ourselves.

When our hands meet, grasp, brush, do the particles in our flesh interact at a subatomic level to produce light?

When our lips meet, do the protons and neutrons and electrons in our flesh spark in some miniscule way that our mortal eyes cannot see but our flesh can feel? Is there something specific about my atoms and your atoms that remember one another, and interact best with one another?

When our bodies press hard together, hard enough to bruise, does the hot rush in my blood come from a thousand miniscule nuclear fusion reactions that can only happen with you and no other?