hold up your hand.
Light is bouncing off it
and into your eyes
right now.
But not instantly.
You are seeing your hand
as it was
a few billionths of a second ago.
you have already lost the present.
Light is the fastest thing
that can exist.
Nothing in the universe
is allowed to go faster.
It crosses
three hundred thousand kilometers
every second.
Seven and a half times
around the entire Earth
before you finish
blinking.
Even light is not fast enough
to bring you the present.
If the sun went out
right now,
you would not know.
For eight more minutes
its light would keep arriving.
You would stand there,
warmed by something dead,
living in a world
that no longer existed,
and never feel the difference.
It is true of everything.
A friend's face across the room
reaches you
billionths of a second late.
Even your own face in the mirror
is the past.
And it is closer than the stars.
The light hits your eye.
Then your brain has to build the image,
which takes
about eighty milliseconds.
So the "now" you live inside
your own head
is always a fraction of a second
behind the world.
Your brain hides the delay
so well
you never noticed you were late.
The iron of atom 738
was forged in a dying star.
When that star collapsed,
it flashed brighter
than a billion suns.
That flash of light
is still traveling.
Somewhere out in the dark, tonight,
that ancient light
is just now arriving
at some far, quiet world,
where something looks up
and sees the very explosion
that made the iron in your blood.
you are both ends
of the same light.
You have never seen the present.
The sun. The stars.
A face you love.
Your own hands.
This very word —
all of it reaches you
from the past,
a little late, always arriving.
so tonight, look up.
Every point of light
is a letter
sent before you were born,
that crossed an ocean of dark
just to reach your eye.