The Stardust of Us

It all started with the Big Bang.

One massive explosion scattered matter, light, and dust across the universe.
Over time, those scattered pieces came together: into stars, planets, oceans, and eventually, into us.

This isn’t just poetic language. It’s science.
The atoms that make up your body were once part of ancient stars. That’s why so many cultures across time have said:

“We’re all connected. We are the universe. We are stardust.”

Every atom in your body was once part of something ancient, explosive, celestial. So maybe it’s no surprise we’ve always tried to explain love through cosmic terms.

The ancient Greeks had their myth: that humans were once whole beings, with two heads, four arms, four legs.
But the gods, threatened by their power, split them in half. And so we wander Earth, forever searching for our missing other half.

Our soulmate.

But what if that’s just a story? What if soulmates aren’t singular?

If we’re made of star particles, and those particles dispersed into countless bodies, countless lives, why would you only have one match?
Why wouldn’t you vibrate with many? With certain people who carry particles that once danced near yours, billions of years ago, when you were still part of the same star?

That, I think, is why I’ve found fragments of myself mirrored in multiple people. Not always romantically—sometimes in the flash of recognition in a stranger’s glance, in a conversation with a friend, in a shared silence that feels oddly familiar.
It’s as if my soul just knows.
Not in a desperate, searching way, but in a quiet, vibrating way, like a tuning fork remembering its note.
It’s recognition. It’s the lingering echo of old matter, old energy, still moving between us.

And maybe the point of life isn’t to find “the one.”
Maybe the point is to recognize these moments of connection when they come and to treat them as gifts, not as quests. A gift of encountering pieces of your ancient self, scattered across time and space, now walking around in other bodies.

We were once whole, but we’re not anymore. And that’s okay.
The task isn’t to complete ourselves through someone else; it’s to keep evolving.

Recently, I talked with someone about this—someone thoughtful, someone curious, someone who knows.
We agreed: soul and spirit are intertwined, but not the same.
Spirit carries imprints of past experience; the soul shapes itself through the life we live now.
When we die, the spirit doesn’t disappear. It disperses, like stardust, entering new forms, each carrying tiny echoes from before.

Maybe that’s why we’re born with preferences we can’t explain.
Why some people feel eerily familiar, even if we’ve just met.
Why, in rare cases, someone remembers a past life: because their spirit carried over more intact.

He told me this is why, in Buddhism, people meditate.
Meditation strengthens the spirit, sharpens its memory, making it more cohesive across lifetimes.

And I sat with that idea.

But I also wondered: why would I want to keep who I am?
Why not let death be a reset?
Why not let the universe scatter me, start a new adventure, free of the old?

I don’t know the answer.

All I know is that I see the world differently now.

I look for pieces of my soul in the people I meet.
Maybe that’s dangerous. Maybe that’s beautiful.
All I know is: I am seeking that ancient vibration. The one I let remind myself that I’ve always been part of something bigger.

And right now, that’s where I’m at.