I’m a temporary pile of stardust with a dog, holding shape for a while on a rented rock. Each breath I take pulls in around 10²² molecules of air — oxygen, nitrogen, carbon dioxide, water vapour. Within about a year, the molecules I exhale diffuse across the planet and enter someone else’s lungs.

Hydrogen, the simplest atom, never disappears. It loops endlessly in water, food, and living things. The glass I drink today contains hydrogen that once moved through bacteria, trees, animals, and people. The iron in my blood was forged in a star that exploded before Earth was even here.

So the borders between us are mostly accounting tricks. The atoms that are me have been you before, and will be again. Still, I’m expected to keep up passwords, locks, and firewalls — a strange demand to guard myself against people who are, in the most literal sense, made of the same matter.

Even if you’re reading this after I’m gone, with the domain still lingering because the hosting was paid ahead, you’re carrying pieces of me. The atoms that held me together — the bits I only borrowed for a time — have already been recycled into the air you breathe and the water you drink. Whatever I was is now part of you.

About me is about you is about us.