Where Stardust Remembers Us

I was one in 46 million.
A drop in the stream of people passing through Helsinki and Copenhagen airports this year.

Journeys that felt vast—yet on a planetary scale, barely a shift.
Like the quiet turn of a breath.

On that July Sunday, I became—in just a few hours—one among tens of thousands.
Moving in sync. Breathing the same rhythm.

In the arrivals hall of Copenhagen Airport, the familiar sweaty chaos of tourism mingled with the scent that still lingers in the city streets—
sausage.
A heavy, filling breath the body recognized immediately—as if it had never forgotten.

Then the metro. Familiar stops. Rows of brick walls weathered by sea wind,
the endless current of bicycles, the smell of bakeries, the cinnamon swirl calling.
The strong rhythm of the language. Its impossible sounds.

The whole city seemed to beat with the pulse of the day
I first arrived here.

For over ten years, this city was my home.
Ten years of streets etched into muscle memory,
corners my body still remembered, old buildings holding a quiet, shared history—
where my experience felt unique,
but was just a brief flicker in a long chain.

A chain
woven with countless small beginnings,
tender cracks in the heart,
fear before the unknown,
and joy in life’s surprising turns that allowed a pause—even if just for a moment.

Generations and eras apart—
and still, the same dreams.
The same palette of emotion.
The same human experiences, repeating again and again—
just in different versions, quiet subplots in a larger story.

The summer return awakened something in the body.
And blurred the outlines of time.

But in the end, it wasn’t just my own history that blurred—
it was me.
The one who once thought he was something permanent.
Someone who, in this city, was even important to some.

But the city had kept its rhythm.
And the spaces where I once felt singular
were now full of new faces.
My trace had already faded.

Everything went on.
Without me—and yet, still in me.
As memory, but more than that:
as an ongoing rebirth,
where nothing ends or becomes complete—
only shifts.

Behind it all shimmered the lightness of letting go
and a soft oneness—
fragile and strong—
a quiet experience of what it is to be human.

.

When three- and seven-year-olds sat in the Christiania bike and wondered how people laugh in Denmark,
they brushed against something delicate and real—
something we so often miss under the hum of daily life.

The language sounded different to them.
The colorful houses echoed another kind of history. The food packages had new pictures—sometimes even flavors.
The tap water left a different aftertaste than back home.
Maybe everything else could also be different.

The playgrounds were different too—
but children’s laughter sounded the same.
So did their crying.
And the tantrums.

The seven-year-old also noticed
that every country has beds, toilets, and clothes.
Hospitals and cemeteries.
And that little siblings, in Denmark too,
can be incredibly annoying.

These small observations in the bike box whispered of something quieter.
Of how, beneath the surface—
beneath all those outer and often superficial differences—
we are like mycelium.

Connected, even when we don’t see it.
A single, breathing web
spreading invisibly beneath the soil—
under our feet, hidden in the damp earth—
binding whole forests into one organism.

A mycelial web stretching deep into history.
And we—
just passing threads. Individual strands.

Like the cells in our body, constantly renewing—but never separate from the whole.
We are not entirely distinct.
And never again entirely the same.

Our bodies are more others than they are “ours.”
We are more bacteria than human cells—
life that has never existed alone,
but has always been part of something else.
A shared rhythm.

The cells linger for a moment—then vanish, like identities do.
But the chain of people, feelings, and experiences continues—
like a candle lighting another flame.

Somewhere in the intersection of constant change and quiet connection, something waits.
Something we often miss.
But sometimes, it’s felt—
like children in a bike box, eyes wide open to wonder.

And when words fell silent,
it felt as though something deeper still pulsed in them—
a memory that we are one fabric,
the same invisible thread,
woven together in ways the mind cannot grasp
but the heart recognizes.

Ways we’ve quietly buried
beneath seriousness, measurement, and hurry.

.

Maybe that’s why those realizations stayed with me.
They moved with me
as I merged once more into the stream of travelers,
following the signs—
one of 46 million.

Even though it was hard to remember
that just a few years earlier,
the stations and skies had gone quiet.

Planes disappeared. Borders closed. Streets emptied.
And the illusion of our thin, separate lives became visible—perhaps for the first time.
Our lives intertwined in mundane ways: grocery store shelves, household pulses—
and in that simple wish to return to something familiar.

Beneath it all, the same longing:
to be seen. To feel connection.

And even when we didn’t touch or meet like before,
dance videos and kittens crossed continents in seconds.
Short clips leapt from pocket to pocket, momentary dopamine relief bypassing time zones and language barriers.
They linked us through screens like mycelium,
inviting us into a moment that almost felt like freedom.

They spread like yawns on a post-work bus ride—
first to the person opposite you, then onward.
Maybe, like a viral video,
a yawn can go viral too—
crossing borders without customs.
Because yawns, laughter, longing, or grief know no borders.

Only the boundaries built in our minds ask for inspection.
Only they insist on separation—us and them.
Everything else connects.

.

Sometimes everything condenses into a single gesture—
a quiet longing to feel something
we don’t quite know how to name,
but often call happiness.

Maybe that’s why even a crowded bus
sometimes feels like a quiet, collective prayer.
A moment when everyone around us feels vaguely familiar—
each just trying to make it through, in their own way.

The person who cut in line at the grocery store—
maybe they weren’t the exception,
but part of the same story,
just in a different chapter.

The neighbor’s grunt in the stairwell, again—
maybe it wasn’t personal at all,
but a small, unnoticed sorrow.
A quiet longing to be seen—
one we, too, have known.

And those who talk too loudly on the phone—
maybe they’re just trying to keep pace in their own storyline,
full of fear and fragile hope.

Like all of us.

And what would remain,
if we no longer had to cling to the story called me—
no need to be right, special, or complete.
No need to carry the weight of the time I thought I was something important and lasting.

Maybe then we’d remember
that we’ve always been one—
the same stardust—
long before we learned to name our differences.

.

July in Copenhagen peeled something back—something no longer needed—and uncovered a shared pulse.

That same pulse flickered in the smallest things—
in bread eaten with fork and knife, with toppings in a precise order—
or in the moment I stood in a 4 p.m. bicycle armada,
staring at the red light with everyone else.
A subtle, shared rhythm that Danes follow with remarkable discipline.
A rhythm that makes one small corner of the world hum like a single living creature.

How easily our lives fall into step with one another—
even as we imagine we’re walking alone,
on our own terms, down our own paths.

And how
beneath all this small, rhythmic connection,
another, even quieter level shimmers—
like the half-remembered sense in a child sitting in a bike box
that we are more united than words can ever reach.

Perhaps it’s words themselves that bury the connection—
pressing it beneath labels and definitions.
The very ones we built our sense of understanding upon.

Our bodies are made of the same matter as the Milky Way,
and the self is just a thin story on its surface.
So fragile, a breeze could erase it.
Like breath evaporating in cold air.

And when our sense of self—
as separate, singular, and so very important—
briefly dissolves,
amid all the internalized haste, optimized living, and screen time—
and gives way to the background hum of the cosmos,
to the emptiness of infinity, the impossibility of the stars,
the laughable absurdity of our existence—
a memory may rise.

A whisper of home—
a place where stardust pulses in one rhythm,
in different shapes and arrangements,
but always breathing together.

Maybe it was never about anything else
but returning to what was never separate.

And then—
we are where life breathes us.
Not outside it.

...

If something in this kept breathing inside you,
perhaps we're walking the same path.
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