Drifting

I’ve been drifting through space for a long time. A few hundred years, maybe. I’ve come to think of it as an openness, an unknowable gap. In a moment, this will end.

I was a young man, maybe in my early twenties, when the company assigned me to a system of telescopes orbiting Earth called the ASTRO-2. They monitored classified information which was never revealed to me. Its observatory required mission and payload specialists to control operations. I was paired with astronaut Devon Pine and together we were assigned a mission to upgrade its Ultraviolet Imaging Telescope which gathered imagery in the spectral range 1200 to 3100 Å. This was my first assignment in space.

On March 2, 2195, I hugged my parents and patted my dog for the last time. A crew composed of Devon, myself, and four others launched into space and remained in Earth’s orbit for eighteen days.

Space greeted us with a welcoming embrace to reflect, but we had neither the time nor energy to do so. Due to the classified nature of the work, we immediately faced an intense and continuous pressure to focus. When we weren’t working the six of us were kept in the confines of an observable pod. These coffins made us ill. Since escape was impossible, I curled up in the corner of mine like a child, counting in my head to make the time pass. 

The program made us decapitate any emotional offspring. Focus was perfection, perfection was necessary for success, success was necessary for further funding, and further funding was necessary for the continuation of the space program. The space program needed to continue, and that’s that.  

We finally approached the ASTRO-2 on March 20th, 2195. The others began the secondary mission to observe unique and classified astronomical targets over the next 60 days. Devon and I set off to begin the upgrade work on a Spacelab pallet in the payload bay of the shuttle where the telescope was mounted.

As we walked along the catwalk toward the pallet, I allowed myself to breathe again. The expanse of space was open, and we could finally stretch. 

As I surveyed the emptiness, a massive object crashed into our shuttle. Devon moved with impeccable speed and confidence to strap herself to a steel beam in the payload bay. I followed suit, connecting to the same piece of support. Her focus in those critical seconds saved our lives. I braced myself on the platform and called into the deck to check on the rest of the crew. Before they could reply, another object collided with the opposite end of the shuttle, tearing the station in two. Our platform pirouetted and ejected the two of us into space. This whole sequence has blurred together in an unformed shape in my mind. I have a hard time remembering how any of it occurred, only that it did.

Devon and I gathered ourselves along the disconnected beam of the payload bay. We were isolated from the crash site. I grabbed ahold of her. We surveyed the increasingly distant accident, searching for signs of the rest of the crew, but we knew they weren’t prepared for ejection. They were unlikely to be wearing their suits. Our hope for finding any signs of life slowly dissolved into the disappearing debris of the wreckage.

Despite our isolation, the first few days were exhausting. We remained diligent, sensitive for signs of rescue. We took turns keeping watch across our perimeter.

Our suits were built to protect us from the relentless chill, collecting micrometeorites and using temperature change to generate life-sustaining energy in perpetuity. They’re tanks, armorized with radiation generated by subatomic particles and similar to the life-cycle sustainment chambers on Earth that the elderly enter in the last days of their lives. They were capable of keeping us alive for thousands of years.

They did not, however, protect me from the bare exposure of openness. Without boundaries, I lost the tangible realities of the sensory universe. Shapes, colors, and movements were abstract and limitless in space. The cleanest definitions left were lines drawn by the blindingly sharp plastics, glass, and fabric of the suits. Devon proved to be the last stable platform under my crumbling consciousness.

Three months after the accident, we lost hope for rescue and disconnected ourselves from the broken portion of the shuttle we had attached to. We connected together and remained that way for two hundred and twenty-six solar years.

We used to wonder if anyone at home was working on retrieving us -- the two lost astronauts. Generations of people had came into and blinked back out of existence since the accident. Had we been written into the chronicles of history as lost heroes? Were we the subject of explorers not yet born when the accident had happened? Did anyone even notice?

We had long lost track of our approximate location, and Devon and I decided to disable the date and time from our systems HUDs. We stopped thinking about the baby explorers. We just drifted out there, encompassed in ethereal blackness. There was only us.

In the absence of the comms system hub of the shuttle, we were not able to talk to each other. Neither of us knew sign language, so over the course of a few decades, we developed our own methods of communication. We first read lips and created signs. Our fingers deliberately formed our emotions, sensations, and conscious thoughts. I’d watch my signs form in front of me while Devon did the same, conveying and processing simultaneously. Our brains slowed to adapt to this way of communicating. The signs consolidated and dropped off over time. We expressed ourselves through eye contact, unbounded by the constraints of our hands. Our emotions were ephemeral and delicate, conveyed honestly. I became intimate with her interests and fears. We used what remained of our decaying physical energy to cling together. 

We understood one another deeper than anyone possibly could on Earth.

I lost memory of others close to me at home. The faces of my parents and friends became distorted, suffocated by the vacuum of time and space.

Long exposure to isolation took my sense of self as well. I was a floating piece of consciousness. Devon was the last vital element, the only occupant that remained. She was my senses. Her breath was my breath. Loss of the self gave birth to the boundless existence and potential of each other. There was no prevailing frontier to separate us.

I anticipated each subtle movement she made before she made it. I knew the constellations of the hair follicles on her face. I memorized the patterns of her eyes underneath her eyelids as she slept. I watched them slow, waiting for the opening of her lashes so I could drift into the array of color underneath. These were the galaxies surrounding me, each a black hole radiating a fiery orange, green, and yellow before drowning in a cold, dark green. They were no longer pieces of Devon alone.

One single moment, like countless others before it, I watched Devon wake from sleep. She stretched and yawned. We planned to pick up remembering was art was like. Devon was signing fire when a small object flashed into view. I signaled for her to look, but we hadn’t developed a sign for “urgency.” Like a pickpocket in a train station, it brushed against her hip. Her legs shot to the side, turning her perpendicular to me. 

The counterforce between the collision and our clip disconnected our suits.

For the first time in decades, I found the boundaries of my body. My core began to burn. My tendons, muscles, bones, and skin came to life. Hard knots formed in my arms and legs. They torched my torpid muscles. I had the coordination of an infant.

I turned to Devon and strained to grab ahold of her. My galaxy, consciousness, and humanity 

-- disconnected -- 

reached for me and I reached back. Our fingertips brushed.

Then the two of us began a slow, futile drift apart.

I stopped breathing.

As she drifted away I compartmentalized the elements of my world - her face, her skin, her eyes, the colors. I kept them assembled.

My determination to focus as she faded away was all encompassing. I had to hold the observation. I couldn’t miss a moment. I did what I could to sign to her that everything would be alright. The pain of this concentration branded my eyes. Nothing was more important than holding on. Every hour that passed killed another piece of her.

After a few days she was a tiny spec of matter against blackness. My breath slowed to not disrupt my concentration. I feared a lapse would cause her to disappear altogether, a lost child’s balloon touching the clouds. 

The burning duration of that time was poison.

I watched, and she was gone. I was alone.

I searched the blackness, waiting for her to reappear. I searched for the object that collided with her, determined for retribution. I screamed in the closed-off shell of my helmet.

Someone had thrown me back into a coffin pod and left me to die. In this state, for the first time in many lifetimes, I sensed myself as an individual again. But all that remained was hollow pain, like a dry socket after a pulled tooth. My vision softened, lining the hard blackness with velvet. My aching, decrepit muscles sagged off my bones like laundry on a clothesline. My mouth was arid. I was a crater, formed and abandoned.

The openness was agonizing, but I held out hope that with enough discipline and attention, a reflection of love could emerge. As I moved through space over the course of another lifetime, I searched for signs of life and love, for signs of Devon. I drifted through weather patterns on gas giants that pulsed to the same rhythm as her eyes while she slept. I passed through nebulas that matched the colors of those eyes. I reached out and touched their dazzling particles of orange, yellow, and green. She was the omnipresent antimatter outside the scope of my comprehension.

A distant nova played out our separation. She was a white dwarf, fading from view. I concentrated on her until every piece of light was suffocated by darkness.

I remained in that darkness for a long time.

At some point, everything shifted. A warmth brushed against me. I regained awareness of the space beyond my suit, like a hallway light outside a bedroom door. I felt the tips of my fingers and toes. The soft cotton inside the suit warmed my skin. I waved my arms and legs through the weightless vacuum of space. It disoriented me. I felt useless and feeble, like I didn’t deserve to exist. 

But I examined the suit for the first time in hundreds of solar years. I studied the harsh definition of the fabric. It pierced through my senses. The tech attached to me was foreign now, forged by a species I no longer recognized. The seams connecting the fabric felt warn, strained from use beyond their intent. Then I noticed a tear along my left leg. It may have been there all along.

I fumbled at it with my restored coordination. The frayed strands of neoprene on the broken seam held strong, dutifully performing their duties. I spent waking days applying pressure at each until they gave up -- popping, fraying, and floating in the vacuum like a sea anemone. One by one, I vanquished my resilient foes, and as I got close to the bottom of the tear, my suit bombarded me with an explosion of alarms and orange lights. My senses overloaded. I clutched at the sides of my helmet, screaming in silence at humanity’s last attempt to contact me. I strained to tear at the last few seams, begging for the vacuum to flood in and pull the screeching cells of my body into space.

Then the alarms cut and the orange lights stopped flashing. The universe was still again. I quivered, unsure if I were dead, but my plaintive muscles responded -- it wasn’t over. My suit had repaired itself at the tear, clotting and scabbing its exterior with glycerol and rubber latex.

Defeat.

My body was a husk carrying an impossible death. I curled up like a child and fell asleep. Searching for hope in the stars was over. The only thing left was loss, growing inside me like a dark patch of mold on a soft lemon. Resigning myself to a deep sleep was the closest thing I was allowed to death. When my body attempted to creak into consciousness, I stubbornly willed it back away from the brink. My determination eventually exhausted it and I slept for a long time.

Then, again, something brushed against me in a warm embrace, gently whispering of life. I stirred, half awake, half asleep, and for the first time, I dreamed.

I was wearing a sweater and blue jeans, lying in darkness. I reached around and felt a basket. Inside, a bottle. Wine? I grabbed a piece of something spongy and smelled it. Rich. I put it in my mouth. Cheese. I touched what I was laying on. Soft. Then I felt someone next to me. They moved close, touched me, and the world exploded with light. Devon. She smiled. We were in the middle of a field. We laid on a black velvet blanket with a spread of fruits, cheeses, and wine. The grass around us was made of thin strands of black licorice. Devon broke off a piece and ate it. I did as well. The sweetness filled my senses. I grabbed another. We nibbled on licorice for a few minutes until an alarm went off. Devon straightened up and put her finger to her mouth, urging me to stay silent. I reached out to console her and she swatted my hand away. Her head cocked to the side. Her mouth and eyes opened wide. She cast her attention toward the picnic basket on the corner of our blanket. She mouthed something awful but I couldn’t hear her. I rushed toward the basket and it snapped shut before I could look inside. I tried to open it, but it didn’t budge. I stood up and strained to pry it. It cracked like a sewer cap. I used the rest of my adrenaline to flip the lid open, tumbling to the ground as it gave way. I sat up but Devon ripped me back down to the blanket, hovering over the top of me. Her gaping mouth and eyes were filled with smoke. I pushed her aside, scrambled to the basket, and peered inside. It was empty save for a small piece of space debris: the object that disconnected us. As soon as I realized this it shot into the sky. Devon lost her grip and shot into space as well. I tried to watch her, but she was gone too quickly. The light around me extinguished.

I’m awake now, and warmer than before. Something outside is wrapping me in its embrace, pulling me toward it. I peel open my eyes and take in a blurry white light.

As I restore myself, my captor emerges and space feels alive. It is enormous and all encompassing, the brightest light I’ve ever seen. It’s magnificent. It swirls and radiates, buzzing with life. It’s a living, breathing star.

It’s her.

Her flares reach and I reach back. We’re still far apart, but I’m accelerating toward her now. I’m warm.

I pass through a small asteroid belt and space debris pelts my suit, tossing me to and fro. Enormous asteroids observe as I flail through their front. I wave. Something hits the glass on my helmet and cracks its outer shell. 

I lose my bearings, but I’m not drifting anymore.

I clear the belt and the star unthinkably doubles in size. The fractured glass on my helmet spreads its light like a chandelier.

The latex repair on my left leg sizzles.

I move faster, and she begins to consume me. I’m no longer alone.

As I hurdle toward her, distant stars blur and fade from my vision in a dizzying spiral. 

I'm going faster. My vision fails. It’s hot. Faster still.

Then the moment passes.