Nonfiction: "Not to me, it hasn't."

We are surrounded by and subject to universal truths--math, the laws of physics, biology--but how we experience those truths is unique and individual to each and every one of us. Overlapping experiences and commonalities lead to generalizations, about life, the universe, and everything. What fascinates me, however, is when, in the middle of talking about how everything's been done before--every story has already been written, everything that can be said, has been said--someone stands up and replies, "Not to me, it hasn't."

It might be fair to say that science underpins the story arc--step by misstep, clunkily working its way from big bang down or from mitochondria up--revealing not the plot but the grammar, the rules behind our existence and engagement with the world around us. It arrives at a story that changes like a mosaic depending on the depth of focus. It threatens to erase us as individuals because it must always be on the outside, quantifying.

It's impossible not to recognize that everything's been done before, impossible not to realize that your own life has already been told in stories, and that ours may be a faded, simpler version of the ones we like to tell each other. Two generations after you die, there won't even be a story arc any more complex than, "Born, reproduced, died." And yet our lives are full, three-dimensional, intensely complex at the cellular level, the muscular level, and inside our brains, tucked away in our own little universe of emotion, insights, and doubt. We all either succumb to the story that our story has already been told, or we stand up for ourselves by focusing on the way the sunlight enters our eyes in a way it never has before and never will again.

This dichotomy fascinates me. I find myself looking for ways to resolve it. Where is the fulcrum, the balance point, the transition from universal to individual? Stories are often an investigation of this question, fluidly going backwards from individual to universal. We read the story of an individual and come away with larger truths. We dive into writing a story about a universal truth and come up for air holding individual characters up by the hair, forcing them to breathe so we can tease them apart and look for the universe in their DNA. We wax eloquent on the fact that we are stardust, a way for the universe to know itself, and we rail against the dying of the light--every light, not just our own.

In the end, we regret not the universality of our experiences as living creatures, but the chances we did not take--the lips we never kissed, the light we never saw, the road we never travelled. We reach the end of our insignificant yet deeply personal collection of moments with the thought, "No to me, it hasn't."