Water That Fell From Nowhere

The water in your cup has never been made. Not by anything on Earth, not by anything alive. It arrived. A billion years before the first fish, before the first cell, before the first rock had cooled enough to touch — this water was already old. It came in the form of ice packed inside the bodies of things falling out of the dark: comets trailing pale light, asteroids the size of mountains, a rain of frozen debris that went on for hundreds of millions of years. Each one hit and the ice flashed to steam, and the steam went nowhere because the planet was finally heavy enough to hold it, and slowly, over time so long it has no human name, the sky rained itself down and the low places filled.

There was no sea on the early Earth. Then there was.

The water didn't change when it got here. It wasn't remade, only moved — from the cold dark between planets to your glass, to your blood, to the cloud outside your window right now building toward tomorrow's rain. The same molecule. The same oxygen, the same two hydrogens, locked together before the Sun had finished lighting itself. You are not drinking something Earth made for you. You are drinking the surviving cargo of a bombardment that should have destroyed everything — and instead, accidentally, made life possible.