Two mammals sit across a small table, and I cannot stop thinking about the heat pouring off them. Each body is dumping roughly a hundred watts into the air, as much as the bulb overhead, so the space between them is quietly filling with two overlapping plumes of infrared neither can see. They lean in. They are, in the most literal thermodynamic sense, warming each other.
Watch the hands. One reaches for a water glass, and to do it, an entire cascade fires: sodium and potassium ions pumping across nerve membranes at a few meters per second, a voltage spike, calcium flooding into muscle, filaments ratcheting past each other on stored chemical energy that traces back, without interruption, to sunlight caught by a plant. She lifts the glass. She has spent starlight to do it.
And the nervousness, the flushed face, the too-fast pulse: that is adrenaline, a small molecule of carbon and nitrogen and oxygen, telling the heart to move more blood, more oxygen, more fuel. The body cannot tell the difference between this and fleeing a predator. So it prepares to run. It stays.
Here is what undoes me. Every atom in both of them, the calcium in the bones, the iron reddening the blood, the oxygen they keep forgetting to breathe evenly, was forged inside stars that lived and died before the Earth existed. Two collections of stellar debris, assembled by four billion years of unbroken inheritance, have arranged themselves into a shape that can look across a table and want.
The universe spent its entire history building the capacity for these two to be nervous about each other.
They think nothing is happening yet. Everything is happening.
It always was.