You can never go home again

April 23, 3022

Day 108

My 35th birthday and almost certainly my last. My heart thuds in my chest as I reach the final crest of the hill and look out at the jungle below me and the ocean beyond that. I never imagined I would be celebrating my final birthday so young and so alone. I take a deep breath and feel the salty, humid air fill my broken body. And then I let out a thundering cry, full of grief and despair that no one will ever hear. 

January 25, 3022

Day 20

As far as I know, I am the only human living on this entire massive blue-and-green orb. It has likely been hundreds of years since the last of my species walked on this land. I wonder what it looked like then. Most of the images I remember of Late Earth from my grade-school textbooks were of gray cities filled with climate refugee camps and dry, scrubby countryside, devoid of plant and animal life. But New Earth, as my elders on the generation ship called it, is lush and verdant, all greens and blues and browns. I have seen no evidence that mammalian life has rebounded yet, which was to be expected. That would likely take millions of years without intervention. But the trees and the shrubs and the flowers have flourished quite nicely in the absence of humanity, at least in this part of the world. The air is clean and breathable and abundant. My heart aches remembering the sacrifices we had made in those hundreds of years off-world due to limits in oxygen production and then cracks wide open knowing the air I am breathing now could have sustained all of us easily and yet I am the only one left to breathe it.

January 20, 3022

Day 16

I buried the final member of my starship today. I know funeral pyres were common in many Late Earth cultures, especially as war, disease, and famine led to skyrocketing mortality rates across the globe, but I couldn’t bring myself to even really consider that option. There was something that felt necessary in putting each of my 157 crew members, my family, my friends, to rest in the ground of the planet they had dreamed of all their lives, even if I was the only one of us who survived to walk that ground. The dream of Earth sustained thirty generations of my people, ancestors who lived and died only ever seeing the planet from space and yet who had passed down the memories, the knowledge, the hope of our first home. What a cruel joke that the girl who had been bored during Earth Studies, who had argued against our return to this planet, would be the only one to survive. 

March 16, 3022

Day 70

I finished a rough map of the island today. It took me less than a day to walk and map the perimeter but the interior of the island is primarily mountainous jungle. It was slow going and treacherous at times but was also a beautiful distraction from my grief. On the homeship, I often longed for the solitude that now overwhelmed me. I would set up a little nest for myself in our 2x2 foot closet, close the door, and spend hours reading by flashlight, just to have a little space and quiet to myself. What I wouldn’t give to sit in our crowded cafeteria, elbow-to-elbow with my people as the cacophony of our voices filled the space and made it almost impossible to make out any one individual voice. Now all I have is quiet and space to myself. I am drowning in it.

January 6, 3022

Day 2

I can’t get up. I know I have to, have to find water, have to salvage supplies, get to high ground, build a shelter. I know I am physically capable of standing - I spent hours yesterday walking around, checking to see if there was anyone else living, anyone injured I could help, anyone with me who could help me make sense of what had happened. When I finally realized that I was the only survivor, the very last of my people, and that all that surrounded me was death and the ruin of what used to be my home, I sat down with my back against the trunk of a palm tree and now I cannot move. 

April 15, 3022

Day 100

I saw what I think was a whale shark today. I was sitting on the rocks near the shore, staring out into the water and willing time to expand, to contract, to do anything but leisurely and mercilessly grind away at me when the surface of the water broke and a huge gray body crested out of the water. It was majestic and joyful and so unexpected that I just stared in awe, not fully registering the movement. I scrambled down the rocks and started to swim out to it. The current was far too strong for my still mediocre skill but I struggled mightily. I admit I was tempted to just let the current take me and I cried tears I did not know my body still held when I eventually washed up on the shore, alone. This is my one-hundredth day alone. I will write more tomorrow. Today, I have no more words. 

March 30, 3022

Day 84

Today, as I push my bare feet into the dirt, breathe the clean, sweet air of Earth deeply, and walk for miles along palm-strewn beaches, everything feels unreal and too real, at the same time. I am overwhelmed with memories from the first 34 years of my life, which all took place on a 1000-foot ship orbiting the planet on which I now find myself. My oldest sister would have died of happiness to swim in the warm ocean I bathe in every day. I cringe at the turn of phrase, hardly noticing if it is in my thoughts or if I have spoken it aloud. After all these days of solitude, of having only myself as a conversational companion, it hardly matters. But my sister talked incessantly about the sea from my earliest memories of her. She would read to me from old oceanography textbooks every night before the lights switched off to conserve energy and mark the shipwide curfew at 8:30 pm. We used to quiz each other on facts about Earth’s oceans and their inhabitants. Once the date was set for our return to New Earth, she switched her area of concentration from hydraulic engineering to marine biology, now that the subject matter was finally deemed practical enough to merit focus. On the day of our descent, she wept tears of joy just at the thought of swimming in the oceans, and I wept tears of joy at her joy. Now, the salt of my tears mingle with the salt of the ocean, and no one is left to grieve for my grief, to mourn for my mourning. 

May 1, 3022

Day 116

I went back to the crash site today, for the first time in a long time. For months, this place haunted me. I avoided it whenever I could. As the end approaches, however, I find I want to be by my people. I want my bones to be with their bones. I will lay myself to rest where I lay them to rest and maybe someday someone will find this place, will find this record, will read my story. And maybe there is no one and all of this has been for naught. Today, I can’t seem to care. When I breathe my last breath, which surely will be soon, maybe I will be reunited with my family. Maybe I will hold my sister in my arms again, and tell my mother of all that has happened over the last 116 days. Maybe she will tell me that she knows it all, that she has been watching over me this whole time. And maybe there will be no one waiting for me on the other side, maybe there will be no other side, and all of this has been for naught. But it hasn’t been for naught. Even if all that awaits me when I close my eyes today is nothingness, sweet oblivion, our effort was not in vain. All the years we spent orbiting the planet, rationing, planning, sacrificing, all for a return that only I, in the end, made, it was still not a waste. It was in the doing. In our lives. We loved, and we tried. Will it all end with me? I am the last of our kind, of the human race, on this planet? Will I be the last, forever? Have I left behind anything of use, for the next of us, if we, if they ever come? These are questions for another explorer now. 116 days ago I lost the life I know. Today, I lose the piece of this planet I’ve come to know. For what? Will there be a greater knowing, a greater life, a land more kind than home, more large than Earth? The skies are getting dark. My thoughts are getting fuzzy. I lay down next to the small stones that mark my family’s grave site. I breathe in the salty air, deeply and then shallower and shallower. Looking up, I see the first star of the night. Or is it another generation ship, pulling close to New Earth to try to get a reading? Questions for another explorer now. 

January 5, 3022

Day 1

We worried, for years, if the air of New Earth would be toxic, if the calculations and measurements would be wrong, if our first terrestrial breaths would suffocate us, poison us, kill us. As I take breath after breath of ash and smoke, moving from one body to another, checking futilely for signs of life, it feels like I really am suffocating. Yet I continue to function, to move, breathing in the horror around me, with nothing as kind as toxic fumes to put an end to my sorrows. It was the calculations about our landing that failed us, not those about the air quality. Information that feels completely useless as I have no one to share with anymore. This day that we built towards, planned towards, suffered towards, for centuries, for generations. How could this be how our story ends? 

January 4, 3022

Day 0

It is our last day aboard this ship. Tomorrow, a new era will begin. Day 1 of New Earth. The anticipation in the air is palpable. Collectively, we’re probably breathing too hard right now, but what does it matter? For once, conservation of oxygen is not a priority for the ship. Every time she looks out the window, my sister immediately looks over at me and squeals in excitement. Earth looms larger and larger as we approach what we’ve been trained to think of as our home planet. It’s always been a little strange to call the blue and green marble of Earth home when even my grandparents’ grandparents have only known stories of Earth. Our ancestors left this planet nearly 600 years ago. Tomorrow we return and fulfill the dream they clung to all those years ago, that the damage our species had done to the planet was not permanent, that life could recover, that humans could have a second chance, and do better this time. If we deserved a second chance was a question that received a fair amount of debate over the centuries. I worry sometimes, and wonder, will we do better? Can we? But we have to try, to keep up hope, to believe we are not forsaken, and that our dreams are worthy. Earth is our home, and in a few hours we return, to find out what that home has become, and what will become of us and our dreams.