What If (Nothing Is Missing): The Story Behind The Song

Recently, I started reading Gary Schwartz’s book The Afterlife Experiments, and very early in the book he talks about photons and the ancient light that has been travelling through the universe almost since its beginning.
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​Scientists can still detect the cosmic microwave background, the oldest observable light in the universe, released approximately 380,000 years after the Big Bang. The patterns carried within that light contain information about the earliest formation of the universe, and those photons have continued moving through space for almost 13.8 billion years before finally reaching the instruments we created to detect them.

I find that absolutely fascinating.

Photons do not age or expire in the way physical matter does. A photon travelling freely through space can continue moving until it interacts with something, and because light travels at the speed of light, time cannot be assigned to it in the same way that it can be assigned to us. We experience those billions of years as an almost incomprehensible stretch of time, but light does not carry a little clock recording the length of its journey.

That idea started swirling around in my mind alongside another scientific reality that sounds almost too beautiful to be true: we are made of stardust.

That is no longer simply poetic prose.

Many of the elements inside our bodies were formed within stars and scattered across the universe when those stars died, eventually becoming part of planets, oceans, trees, butterflies and us. The matter that gathered long enough to become my body has existed in other forms before me, and the light leaving me now may continue travelling long after this particular version of me is gone.

What does that mean? I honestly do not know. But I love thinking about it.

What if the things we call missing are not actually gone, but have simply changed form? What if absence is sometimes a matter of perspective? What if the empty spaces we are constantly trying to fill are also the spaces that allow us to see through to something larger? And what if our lives are not separate little fragments at all, but temporary arrangements of ancient matter, light and energy gathered together long enough to breathe, love, learn and wonder?

These are the kinds of philosophical thoughts that have always swirled around inside my brain, usually without anywhere specific to go. I am so grateful to have music as a way to finally express them.

​That is where this song came from.

While the final recording was produced with the help of generative AI technology, the lyrics, melodies and musical concepts are entirely my own. The technology helped me turn what I could already hear inside my head into something I could finally share outside of it. This is 'What If'

What If (Nothing Is Missing)

​[Verse 1]
What if all the missing pieces
Were never missing after all?

What if every space and absence
Every blunder, every fall

What if every crack and crevice
Every place we came apart
Isn’t something lost or broken
Just another place to start?

What if all our empty spaces
All the holes we try to fill
Aren’t as empty as we call them?
What if light is in them still?

[Chorus]
What if
Nothing here is missing?
What if
Nothing ever was?

What if all the spaces deep within us
Are mere reflections of the stars?

What if
The pieces we call missing
Are the spaces we see through?

What if all those empty places
Let the light come shining through?

[Verse 2]
What if every breath and heartbeat
Were a thread within it all?

What if every space and moment
Every lifetime, every fall

What if every knot and tangle
Every thread we wished undone
Isn’t something wrong or broken
Just the fabric we’ve become?

What if all we see are tangles
All the threads that twist and tear
Aren’t as random as we call them?
What if there’s a pattern there?

[Chorus]
What if
Nothing here is missing?
What if
Nothing ever was?

What if all the spaces deep within us
Are mere reflections of the stars?

What if
The pieces we call missing
Are the spaces we see through?

What if all those empty places
Let the light come shining through?

[Verse 3]
What if every butterfly
Thinks she can only crawl.

What if every striking colour
Every marking, great and small

What if she can’t see her beauty
Every colour we hold dear
Never knowing painted colours
On the wings we see so clear?

What if we are no different
All the beauty that we bear
Isn’t something we can recognize
When we’re standing far too near?

[Verse 4]
What if we are made of stardust
Borrowed for a little while?

Ancient atoms drawn together
Long enough to breathe and smile?

What if light goes on forever
Racing past our sense of time?
Moving outward through the darkness
From a billion distant skies?

What if we have danced this dance before
On worlds we’ll never see
Gathered briefly into matter
Long enough to simply be?

Then we scatter back to starlight
Back to everything we knew
And somewhere in another darkness
Something flickers into view

[Chorus]
What if
Nothing here is missing?
What if
Nothing ever was?

What if all the spaces deep within us
Are mere reflections of the stars?

What if
The pieces we call missing
Are the spaces we see through?

What if all those empty places
Let the light come shining through?

What if
Nothing here is missing?

What if
Nothing ever was?​
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