In 1973, Carl Sagan wrote: "The nitrogen in our DNA, the calcium in our teeth, the iron in our blood, the carbon in our apple pies were made in the interiors of collapsing stars. We are made of star stuff."

He said it again in Cosmos, in 1980. He said it many times. It was not a metaphor. He meant it literally — that every atom heavier than hydrogen in your body was forged in a stellar interior and scattered across the galaxy when that star died.

We are not like stars. We are not inspired by stars. We are made of them — their ash, their legacy, their long slow gift to whatever came next.

Every atom in your body heavier than hydrogen has a stellar origin. These are the six that make you most distinctly you — the ones that show up in your bones, your blood, your breath, your brain.

None of them were made on Earth. All of them arrived here the same way: scattered by supernovae, gathered by gravity, assembled by time into the improbable configuration that is a human nervous system.

Your neurology is as old as the stars. The particular way your mind works — the frequency, the intensity, the pattern — is built from the same material as everything else the universe has ever made. It belongs here.

The phrase moves through scales. "Down to your star stuff" is a direction — inward, deeper, smaller, older. It names every level at which you can be loved.

Most love operates at the level of behavior and personality — the things that are visible, the parts that present themselves to the world. This phrase insists that love go all the way in. Past the mask, past the accommodation, past the things that are hard.

Down to your star stuff means: I see you at the level where there is nothing left to pathologize. At the level of carbon and calcium and iron, you are simply matter that the universe made. And matter that the universe made belongs.