UNAWARE

Mike shut the door to his modest one-bedroom home and headed up the road toward his car, fumbling for the keys in his pocket. A cool twilight breeze swept up the street from behind him, billowing its way up the inside of his shirt, and rustling through his hair. The past month had yielded uncomfortably warm evenings in his quiet New England town, the temperature slowly building in anticipation of August. But it was always windy and cooler near his house, up away from town, where the road crested the hill.
He spotted his car in the waning daylight as he approached the summit, parked in front of one of the little diners he loved to frequent. From up here, he could almost see the entire town; from the church steeple standing high above the tree line behind him, to the river which defined the edge of town to the north. He looked over his shoulder as he crossed the road to his car, back down the hill in the direction of the grocery store. Mike never understood why, but every time he looked down from the summit, he could see grey-coated Confederate soldiers very vividly in his mind, charging up the hill, bayonets ready.
What Mike didn't realize is that matter cannot be created or destroyed. He wasn't aware that his body was constructed from and maintained by particles in the food he ate. He didn't know that crops were made from the soil in which they grew, and the rain which watered them, and light particles from the sun. He didn't realize that the soil was the fibers of plants and animals and their waste products, decomposing over the years. He didn't know that the rain evaporated from lakes and oceans all over the world before it condensed in the sky and fell from the clouds. He didn't understand that what he called his life began not when he was born, but when he was built from the materials available in his mother's womb.
Mike wasn't aware that the sunlight came from a bright yellow star some 93 million miles away, traveling through the dark matter of space at nearly 190,000 miles per second. He didn't realize that the sun consisted of atomic nuclei fusing together, drawn to a central gravitational point in the universe for the past four-and-a-half billion years. He didn't know that before that, the atoms had been cast out by collapsing stars throughout the galaxy, traveling through the void from points unimaginable for countless millennia.
Mike didn't know that every atom in his body, every fiber of his being, had existed since the dawn of time, eons before his consciousness ever formed a sense of self within the universe. He didn't realize that the matter which composed his body and mind carried with it trace memories of the world long before it converged onto the point where Mike began. He wasn't aware that parts of himself were present at the bombing of Nagasaki, and at the Birth of Christ, and at the Big Bang when the universe began almost 15 billion years ago. And he wasn't aware that a few molecules in his right cerebral hemisphere were once a part of the optic nerve of Private William P. Hocking, killed by Confederate forces at Front Royal, Virginia, on May, 23, 1862.
Mike looked down the hill for a moment longer, wondering why sometimes the vision was stronger than others. Unlocking the door, he slid into the driver's seat, staring at the grocery store at the bottom of hill in the rear-view mirror. Shaking his head, he ignited the engine and pulled out into the road, cresting the hill as a few stars began to appear in the darkening blue above.