Dust everywhere. A dim red star shined through. It has been quite a long journey through those dusty roads. The earliest memories I have are the ones from the thick haze of a gas cloud – drifting through space awed by the myriad of shapes formed by gas clouds passing by. On my journey I slowly started meeting new friends, big and small. We used to have fun naming the gas clouds around us and building stories out of them. As active little kids we frequently bumped into each other. These were moments when we envied the bigger guys in the distance, who seemed to take more open routes with lesser collisions to worry about. Such a care-free life. Those early days though were really the best, surrounded by so many like me. The more friends I met, the more I felt I was growing.

Round and round we went around that dim light source which appeared less red and more brighter than before. Me and my pals had grown bigger but I did feel the distance between us increasing. We did have some really long conversations wondering about our origins or why we are here in the first place or about adventures while travelling through dense jungles of gas. Some even narrated ancient tales of evil gas clouds that no traveller has been able to pass through. Friends came and went but one thing remained constant – the warm company of the young sun, always looking at me from somewhere out there!

Maybe went a million times around the sun, which just seemed to grow brighter and warmer as I too grew in size. I was more happy for its company though, as now I was mostly lonely with almost all of my old companions gone, they too growing in size and parting on their own ways. I now had empty routes with an occasional passer-by. Even the dense gas clouds seemed something of the past. I had become the one I used to envy in my early days. But it didn’t feel anything close to fun as I had imagined. It was lonely.

I then spotted this someone in the distance. Someone that shined. Seemed like one of those icy alien objects from the outer reaches of the solar system. It did feel like a mutual attraction. Time went slow. But we finally met. The gravity was so strong it lead to a collision. It was a very dynamic phase and we finally became one. Our explosive union did end up making many little ones. Tiny particles just like me in my early stages, were thrown out into various directions into the cosmos, each left to their own fate.

Many more orbits later, I felt chemical changes happening within me. Chemical differentiation it was. I had been through multiple impacts and was now massive enough for the heavy elements to sink deep into my heart – the core, and the lighter elements to come up to the surface, forming separate layers. The core was warm with all the primordial heat – the internal heat accumulated from all the material that had accumulated to form me. The ignited core did make me aspire for one dream – To be a Planet and become a dominant force in the solar system with no one to challenge my powerful appearance and massive gravity!

I felt like a juggernaut filled with aspirations. But the universe wasn’t a kind place. Soon I found someone approaching in my direction – a competitor. It was humongous. All the belief that I had cleared my surroundings off competitors went crashing as we approached closer and closer. Fear set in. It was the end. The collision was nothing like I had experienced before – extremely violent. It ripped apart my whole existence and the early cracks reached till my young little heart. The warm core felt the cold of space and its heat extinguished. With the death of my core died my dreams of Planetary supremacy. Dreams shattered, into a zillion tiny fragments. Some pieces fell on my murderer, while others whizzed in various directions, hurling through empty space.

Here is one of the pieces that survived. A piece of my core-mantle boundary. It wandered around in the asteroid belt until Jupiter nudged it into the inner Solar system. After a billion year journey, here it finally landed – on this blue planet, where you found it. In your hand you hold a Pallasite – the shattered dream of a proto-planet.