Lessons From the Kissing Booth

We've talked before about how Treasure Island was lost to Stevenson once his original map went missing, how the story with the new map was always a little bit of an imposter. In the way that we start our stories with laying out their boundaries, how no one else's version is ever quite our own because their outlines are always different.

Recently a documentary told me that although it takes eight minutes for a photon to reach Earth from the sun, more importantly it can take thousands of years for that photon to travel from the core to a place where it can even leave to head in our direction. That little bit of light spends most of its journey getting knocked around by other particles, wandering and wandering through all of that fire until it finally gets propelled out into the dark and cool of space. I was dozing on and off through the documentary, but I wondered about all of those tiny pieces of light and the maps that they carried with them to the center of the sun, a center that almost certainly would look nothing like their maps once they made it here to show us the path. And if in that way our sun could ever really be their sun.