Water Older Than the Sun

You just drank something older than the star outside your window. The water in your cup was not made here, not made by Earth, not made by anything alive. It formed in the cold between stars — a cloud of gas and dust so vast it would take light thousands of years to cross it, so cold that hydrogen and oxygen locked together on the surfaces of tiny grains of ice and simply waited. Then something disturbed the cloud. A shockwave, perhaps from a nearby star dying. The cloud began to fall inward on itself. At its centre, our Sun ignited. Around it, the leftovers clumped into planets — and some of those clumps were made of ice. Comets and asteroids carried that ice inward, falling into the young Earth over millions of years, and the ice melted into oceans. The molecule you swallowed has been a comet, a rain cloud, a glacier, an inland sea, the blood of a creature that has no name because nothing was there to name it. It evaporated, rained down, froze, melted, seeped through the ground, rose through the roots of a tree, fell again. It has been doing this since before the Earth had a Moon. It is not borrowed from somewhere else. It is older than here.