The story of my life

Let me introduce my oldest ancestors, at the root of my family tree.  They were a pair of hydrogen atoms.  I can't remember their names, to my eternal shame.  They lived in the core of a star which some say was over a billion years old.  Theirs was a typical romance – they met, they reacted, they fused and produced offspring.  Their children included a deuterium and a helium atom, but of more import to my destiny was the little gamma ray they sired.

This little gamma ray, my father, had a short life, unfortunately.  He was absorbed almost straight away in that ancient star's core, and gave birth to a son.  Me.  He named me Photon, after the Greek word for light, an act which always puzzled me, as this all happened a long time before there were any Greeks anywhere.

I packed my bags and bade my farewells, keen to embark on my life.  I began the journey to the surface of the star.  This journey took me 100,000 years of constant bumping and jostling through the interior of the star until, aged but unwearied, I reached the star's surface and finally left my maternal home, poised for the next chapter in my life.

100,000 years of close contact with my neighbours inside the star certainly left me unprepared for what was to follow.  After all that "community spirit", as exasperating as it was at times, I was to find myself travelling through cold black space for 1,000,000 years, without interacting with a single living soul.  I became quite introspective through this period of my life, with little else to occupy myself other than my thoughts.  But life is full of surprises, as we shall soon see.

After 1,000,000 years of constant travelling, I had reached my destination.  I came to rest in the retina of a man's eyeball.  Imagine that: after 1,000,000 years of travelling through the vastest distances imaginable, I didn't collide with this man's nose, or his chin.  I travelled directly through the little hole in his eye, who was called Pupil, and came to land in his retina.  I have always been proud of my accuracy, and leave this as my greatest achievement.

I made an immediate acquaintance with a cell in the retina, who was called Rod.  I will make no bones about it; Rod changed me.  Rod transformed my life.  Where once I was but a Photon, I was now an electrical impulse, and my new course in life was the optic nerve, the visual highway into this man's brain.

After 1,000,000 years of life as a hermit, I had come full circle, to a place which reminded me of my childhood home – that bustling and lively interior of the star.  Here I was in a place called brain.  It was breathtaking.  Once I again was I in the company of trillions of electrical impulses, just like me, zipping and zapping all about the place.  I felt alive.  I felt like I had a purpose.  I had a team of friends working with me on a common goal. I knew this would be my last act in this big old universe, but that knowledge made me feel peaceful.  My mission was to make a word form in this man's mind.

And that word was:
STAR

I was home.