All life on this planet begins with a common origin, a stirring of the primordial soup, a reordering of acids into an elegant double helix, a warm gelatinous mat of quivering single cells. There we are, you and I, and her and him, and that little child with the red-handled scooter riding recklessly around the metro station. There too are the birch tree, the apple tree, the bee, the moth, the cockroach, the woodpecker, the dodo bird, the dinosaurs, the trilobites and the species of of Staphylococcus. You can still feel it sometimes, the magnetic pull of this common origin point. How all living things contain within themselves a pair of delicate strings that tremble at the same harmonic frequencies when you pluck at them, how they call to one another sometimes in yearning.