Full Moon Eyes

If it hadn’t been for the framing of my helmet, I would’ve thought I was dead. Beyond the thin glass barrier was nothing at all; utter darkness. When someone’s power goes out during a storm, or when an urbanite goes camping, they only think it's dark. This is like laying in a dark room with your eyes open. Your brain tries to make out shapes, but you know there are none. There’s no difference between closing your eyes, or keeping them open. The term pitch black beholds new meaning amidst the final frontier. I am lost in space.

I had been sleeping. I can’t say for how long, probably days. Days. Is there even such a thing out here? No stars, no flickers of life that I can see. Oh, if the pillars of creation could see me now. I’m my own galaxy, my own Sun and Moon on my own Earth. My eyes weep waterfalls upon dry dunes, aching to sowe new life in me. But I will not grow. Instead, I drown under this black sea.

How had I gotten here? So many reasons could be had, so many tales spun. But why else is an accident called an accident? You see them all the time. Maybe our course was off, or our emergency supply was too low. Or, maybe we were right on track. I was happy, at least, having volunteered for the right reasons. All my life I had dreamt of being among the stars, never quite fitting in my own two shoes. And here I am. Not quite what I envisioned. The feeling in my limbs has nearly gone now, making the weightlessness of my body even less descript.

Upside down, sideways, there’s no such thing anymore. Not out here. I could be careening through space at three hundred miles an hour and not feel a thing, and I don’t care. I'm in a peaceful paralysis with my eyes the only things left moving, and I’m losing hope. There’s nothing to see, nothing to feel that makes anything worth considering. I’m dying, or nodding off again, I’m not sure. But I’m succumbing to a loneliness that must be death. Nothing above me, or below. Nothing to hear, nothing to see that stimulates imagination…until I see it; the star.

At the right end of my peripheral is a tiny white dot against the noir backdrop. It twinkles as it slowly inches across my view. Hello, friend. I stare at it with more intrigue than I thought possible. I suppose I wasn’t spinning, or else the star would’ve zoomed past me a dozen times by now. But it stays, smoothly sliding to the left. It’s like watching a car pass by on a distant midnight highway, or seeing that first flat EKG reading. I can’t be sure that it’s a star at all, but it’s what I choose to believe. I make a wish upon it, hardly daring to think it out loud should it not come true. My eyes follow it until the end as it reaches the left edge of my glass view. It gives one last charming glisten, then disappears. I feel lonelier now than ever. Wishes on a star are superstition anyway.

A tear lifts off my eyelash to fly for the first time. It has no wings, yet feels the freedom of blue jays and jet airplanes. How lucky I am to give such a gift. It floats around me, bouncing off the glass with clumsy precision, then coming back to hit my cheek with cold tenderness. It kisses me before disintegrating forever. The gesture wells inside, and I let a dozen more kindred droplets adrift before me. They sparkle like stars as they pose against my helmet glass, staring out at the void expanse. I wonder where my crew is now. Perhaps they’re thinking of me. 

The last time I cried was when my dog died. My first dog, but not my second. She had gone deaf, then blind in her fourteenth year. Instead of walking, she had started swimming like the sharks do; head first at walls until turning at the last second. She didn’t mosey. She floated from room to room with full moon eyes. I cried four times on her last day, and never since. Even now, I force myself to blink the tears away. Is this all I’m capable of? Still fearful of who’s watching at the edge of the unknown? I quiver with shame…and cowardice.

Maybe this is where I belong. Adrift. Like the star, I am a sole entity. I declare this space my solar system. Nothing else lays claim for lightyears around. There’s power in a populace, but so is there in solitude. This blank canvas allows for a heightened level of creation no one on Earth can comprehend. My eyes fill with visions of swirling gasses and atoms colliding with the strength of supernovas. I rear planets of my own design, but I mostly design green ones; lush spheres of great lands and vast oceans. I raise mountains, plant trees and carve rivers. I harbor civilizations of varying degrees, to which they grow beyond my understanding and parentage. I think of home. I clear a space atop a hill where a house now sits, with a crimson shed to the side and a trail for patrolling dogs. A view of the stars is clearer here than anywhere I’ve been before, or ever will be.

I shut my eyes for the last time, breaking my tether. My body drifts the same as it has for the past countless days. Days. If there even is such a thing at all. My visions slow to a subdued tone akin to the space around me. And as I begin to dose for the last time, the star returns to pass me by. Or it doesn’t. I don’t look to see. Perhaps it was never there at all. “His soul shalt taste the sadness of her might,” I whisper. “And be among her cloudy trophies hung.”