In Your Orbit
If I stop thinking, everything slows - first imperceptibly, then faster. It takes so much concentration to keep this spaceship orbiting, despite the solar panels. It’s a job for two
If I don’t steer us safely, we will fall out of orbit and begin our descent back to earth, mars, wherever. My passengers will either cling grimly on or go about their daily tasks without noticing the corridors sloping ominously, the crystal tumblers sliding from side-tables and crashing to the floor, splintering into jagged shards which themselves tumble towards gravity. The way your whisky overtopped and hit the carpet.
The children notice nothing. They are so, so busy in their own little worlds that they don’t see the cool blue earth through the round windows of the living-space. They filter out the multiple sunrises and sunsets and don’t understand when I talk about ‘days’ and ‘nights’ as though there’s a specific activity for each. When tired, they sleep through several cycles round the earth, their eyelids fluttering a little in bright light, their breathing softening down into a deeper rhythm in the darkness. Time means nothing to them; I am the clock that structures their lives.
I notice the engine is slowing. It is because I stopped concentrating. I’m not sure when it happened, what distracted me.
Was it when I stopped to tend to my tiny satellites?
Did my brain, as I smoothed blankets over their tiny bodies, stop remembering?
Was I distracted by the blue and green perfection of the distant horizon?
Or maybe by their demand for another story?
All my attention, soaked up, none to spare.
Maybe it was when I stopped to look at the stars. Look, I said, pointing to the brightest one, saying nothing of the chain reaction, burning hot as our sun. There has always been fire, where there has been light. Things burn, I don’t say. The light you see left that star at the same time someone, centuries ago, worked out you could make a book with tiny metal letters, grouped together, stamped in ink. Since then, that light has been unwavering in its quest to get here. They are too young to understand.
I stare through the porthole, up at the night sky, thinking about how, through the vastness of the universe, light is finding its way to me. How I would love to be sitting out on a warm summer night, in a cool breeze, bare feet propped up, a sweating beer in my hand, looking at the stars, looking into your eyes. In that time we had, before spaceships and satellites and whisky and fire.
But that seems light years away; now it's just me at the helm and the ship is falling, falling, falling towards something, or maybe just falling.
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