In My Eyes, You Were Always Shining.
Translated by AI. Read the Chinese original ↗
This New Year, my hometown finally lifted its fireworks ban.
Early spring evenings were still windy. The air was full of that slightly choking gunpowder smell familiar since childhood.
My girlfriend and I walked down the street.
Fireworks burst overhead: red, yellow, blue, green, lighting half the night sky.
In the few seconds when they faded, a few lonely stars flickered at the sky’s edge.
She suddenly stopped, gazed upward, then turned and asked out of nowhere:
“Hey, do you know the difference between you and the stars?”
I paused and honestly asked, “What difference?”
She smiled, adorable:
“The stars are in the sky. You’re in my heart.”
Ha. A cheesy love line.
Looking at her face, slightly pink from cold, I went off script.
I pointed at a gold firework bursting overhead, then the faint distant stars, and looked into her eyes:
“Actually, to me there’s no difference between you and the stars.”
She frowned. “Huh?”
“You just said I’m in your heart.”
I tucked her collar closer.
“Do you know? The calcium keeping your heart beating, the iron flowing in your blood, and those stars tens of light-years away are really the same stuff.”
“We’re not looking at stars. We’re looking at our previous lives.”
She paused. “Previous lives?”
“Yes.”
I took her hand and kept walking. The wind ahead seemed less cold.
“Just after the Big Bang, there was nothing but the simplest hydrogen and helium.”
“Those gases gathered into the first stars.”
“Their interiors were extremely hot, squeezing hydrogen atoms together into nuclear fusion.”
“The oxygen in the air, the carbon in your body—ancient stars slowly forged them over billions of years.”
I pinched the metal zip on her coat:
“The iron in your blood and these metals are different.”
“Ordinary stars stop burning at iron.”
“To make iron, or heavier gold and silver, takes the most complete kind of death.”
“When a huge star reaches its end, it collapses inward, then explodes.”
“A supernova.”
Cosmic Explosion. Space background with nebula and stars
“Only in that instant’s extreme heat and pressure can the universe forge gold and iron, then scatter them among the stars.”
More fireworks rose in the distance.
Those were brief burns of gunpowder. The universe’s explosion was light a star spent its whole life earning.
Bang—
Bang—
Tree shadows brightened and dimmed.
She took her hand from her pocket and clasped mine in return.
“So… we’re stars too?”
“Yes.”
“Fragments of stars.”
“Billions of years ago, a giant star exploded.”
“Its dust drifted through the universe a long time.”
“Then gathered into Earth.”
“Over long geological ages, it churned, cooled, and slowly rose with time.”
“Became the Taihang and Lüliang Mountains.”
“Became us.”
I looked into her eyes:
“So in my eyes, you were always shining.”
“Stars aren’t only in the sky. They’ve always been beside me.”
Vendors called from the night market.
She said, “I’m a little hungry.”
We walked toward her favorite grilled cold-noodle stall.
White steam rose.
My little foodie, there was one thing I did not get to say:
Many find the universe cold, empty, distant.
But to those of us who study physics—
It is unbearably romantic.
To arrange for two insignificant fragments of stars to meet and hold hands today,
Billions of years ago,
The universe had already set off the most dazzling fireworks for us.