Space Travel
On Orbital, Rocketman, and ten years abroad
I had never dreamed of going to space. It’s not for lack of ambition or wonder, and it’s certainly not a result of overwhelming contentment. Like many who came from where I was, I had dreamed of escape. You would think that space is the ultimate escape. It’s alluring: to be one with cosmic dust, far from the horrors of mankind; to witness genesis and study revelation; perpetually afloat amongst a boundless universe, no longer subject to gravity and the natural orders. I’ve been afloat. I’ve drifted, swayed, tumbled. Across worlds I could only read about and and across destinies never mine. Buoyed by the certainty that I am made for something greater. How arrogant. Ah, but I was a child. I was drifting, I was in a vacuum. Let gravity take me, that will be my escape. I dream of harbour.
As it happens, my desire for escape was greater. I hopped on the next rocket, the quickest way out. This year marks my tenth year in space. A decade far from home. I suppose it’s not that far, geographically. I tell people that it does not matter. What matters is the distance between who I am and who I must be to survive. I try to quantify it and I fail. There is no measure. As far as I am concerned I am in a nameless galaxy. I am a routine of work and commute, achieved by strategies measured with a scientific precision to ensure optimum lifespan.
I try to count the births and the deaths I had missed, the unions I could not attend, love I could not give adequately. I succeed and I cry, feeding a reservoir that will salve the next decade. No medicine for this grief or that guilt. At 17 I learned my arrogance. Out here your smallness towers over you, immediate and insistent. At 18 I met a girl and her friendship saved me. At 20 I moved into a new shuttle and I prayed to float a little longer. At 24 my heart swelled before a star and I thought I could stay here forever, maybe.
“We grow out of the royalty of childhood into supreme normality…companionship is our consolation for being trivial”.
I would not claim that I had found heaven. The years go by and I am allowed a closer look, adulthood wrapping around my shoulders. I am a foreign object and they will not let me forget it.
“Up here, nice feels such an alien word. It’s brutal, inhuman, overwhelming, lonely, extraordinary and magnificent. There isn’t one single thing that is nice.
God, no. This isn’t a complaint. I will reap what I have sown. I walk on the sidelines replete with crystals. I am the luckiest being. Sometimes my sadness is insurmountable.
At night I listen to Rocketman. It has been a decade-long source of comfort. It is said that it was inspired by a short story by Ray Bradbury that tells of an cosmonaut that agonise over his desire to remain in space and his love for his wife and son. It is said that the cosmonaut will choose space once more, given the choice, but would not wish for his son to follow in his footsteps.
It is not for the faint-hearted, space. Life you leave behind goes on without you. Proceed with caution, I would tell you, but do not hesitate.
“Our lives are inexpressibly trivial and momentous at once,…both repetitive and unprecedented. We matter greatly and not at all. To reach some pinnacle of human achievement only to discover that your achievements are next to nothing and that to understand this is the greatest achievement of any life, which itself is nothing, and also much more than everything. Some metal separates us from the void; death is so close. Life is everywhere, everywhere.”
I am a rocketman, dreaming of harbour.
