Written March 3, 2009

As I near my twenty-first birthday, I can’t help but think that come next November, I will officially have a completely different body than I did when I was fourteen. My skin, hair, toenails, nerve endings, blood vessels have been replaced and renewed, transferring their information from ‘parent’ to ‘child.’ This is astounding! What have I forgotten? What have the neurons in my complicated brain failed to replicate? What has ‘parent’ kept to its dying self? I remember being fourteen. I remember my seven-year-old self vaguely. Is that being actually me? —The same me? Really, that being is a concept now—an entity, an idea, a memory, someone I will never be again.

I have been around for twenty years and counting. Well, Earth…Earth has been around for 4.5 billion years—its a very young planet. Its body is completely different now as well. However, Earth is so young that its ‘excrement’ is still visible. The stratigraphic rock sequences that still exist below our feet and on mountain ridges, which provide detailed descriptions of past environments, will eventually melt in the core and resurface through volcanoes, like cells replicating. The earth at certain points in its young history was a mass of fire, a mass of water, a mass of giants, a mass of buildings. It is changing and it will continue to change. Zoom out. Right now. We are specs. We have been walking around on this planet, infesting it like “good” bacteria infests our skin and mouths. If you were to stretch the geologic timeline out to the length of a ruler, Homo sapiens would span less than half a millimeter. WE ARE MINUTE. The earth will shed us in a time comparable to the time it takes our bodies to shed bacteria.