Borrowed Atoms

Every atom heavier than helium

was cooked inside a star that had to die.

The calcium that lets me hold a coffee cup

was pressure in a furnace in the sky.

The oxygen you're breathing in this second

is older than the ground, the sea, the sun —

you are a temporary arrangement

of some very, very ancient things on loan.

Borrowed atoms! Borrowed atoms!

Not a single part of me is mine,

I'm a rental agreement with a heartbeat,

and I'm handing it back on time.

But for a hundred thousand hours

these old wandering things got to be a man —

and this man got to hold another man's daughter

in the kitchen, in the morning, in his hands.

Borrowed atoms... doing that.

Ninety-eight percent of your body is replaced annually.

You are not an object. You are a process.

A pattern that water moves through.

I have no correction to make.

And here's the part that stops me in the street:

the cells that hold the memory of you

are mostly not the kind that get replaced —

everything else about me has been swapped,

the hands, the skin, the blood, the whole machine,

but the part that kept the way you said my name

in a stairwell in a city in the rain

is the oldest thing I own. It stayed. It stayed.

So take it! Take it back, I always knew it wasn't mine!

Take the carbon, take the iron, take the water and the lime,

put it in a tree, put it in a whale, put it in a stone,

put it in some kid ten thousand years from now who'll never know —

just let the record show, just let the record show:

for a minute — for one minute —

these borrowed atoms knew somebody's name!

Borrowed atoms! Borrowed atoms!

Not a single part of me is mine,

I'm a rental agreement with a heartbeat,

and I'll hand it back on time —

but the terms don't say I can't be glad,

and the terms don't say I can't be loud,

so here's to every borrowed thing that ever

got to stand up in a room and love out loud!

Borrowed atoms... doing that.