It gives my life stability. It's better than living out a maybe. I'm learning to hate the word maybe. Maybe bounces inside the cramped hollow of my skull. To quiet it, I make a foray onto the internet, which has precisely the opposite effect. I now see a multiverse of malignancies. Maybe it's severe anemia secondary to celiac disease. Maybe it's PCOS. Maybe it's stress. Maybe it's diabetes. Maybe it's cancer. That puts a chill up my legs. The only thing worse than having a disease is maybe having it. There's no fighting a maybe. There's no confiding in others about it. Maybe rests on the back of my neck like a stranger's hand.

Then tests start coming back. Negative after negative. I'm defined by a void and must now learn how to live inside it. 'Ultrasound' starts to fight for space at the edge of my every thought. That means knowing. And that means telling my mum. There's no one else I trust on this side of the Atlantic, but it's difficult enough dealing with my own feelings. I don't know if I can handle hers, too.

On days when maybe is ready to sweat out of my pores, I watch videos of Carl Sagan and Neil deGrasse Tyson. They describe a philosophy of interrelatedness. A brand of atomic immortality. Rewind just over 14 billion years to the beginning of time. It's not a nice place to be. Like most family gatherings, things are uncomfortable, they're complicated, and they're messy. The organic hodgepodge of nitrogen, carbon, and oxygen necessary to create our bodies doesn't exist yet.

The first stars live fast and die young. When they burn, their cores eventually create iron. This is a byproduct. A deadly one quietly growing and metastasizing out of sight. Once iron is fused inside its heart, the star's energy starts to flag. The delicate balance between thermonuclear fusion and gravity tips toward gravity. The star collapses on itself, then explodes. But such deaths accomplish one important thing: they create heavy elements. The beautiful supernovae we see at night are the remnants of the same interstellar wreckage. They enable a future for the next generations of stars like our sun, which are relatively sedate and slow-burning. The dust orbiting around them slowly solidifies into planets, at least one of which has the right ingredients for life.

It sounds pretentious, but it's real. The atoms in my pinkie may come from a star like Vega. Or maybe they're spat out the arse-end of a black hole. Everything is related and recycled. Hundreds of people have taken the same breath of air that I'm taking now. The water in my body is on a nonstop journey between the bottom of the ocean and the edge of the atmosphere. Living on Earth means constantly exchanging molecules with everything else on the planet. Even the planet itself. The whole solar system melts into a single lineage of light and fire that's banked inside our bodies.