Orbital

by Samantha Harvey

Raw space is a panther, feral and primal; they dream it stalking through their quarters.

A hand-span away beyond a skin of metal the universe unfolds in simple eternities.

Space shreds time to pieces. They were told this in training: keep a tally each day when you wake, tell yourself this is the morning of a new day. Be clear with yourself on this matter. This is the morning of a new day. And so it is, but in this new day they’ll circle the earth sixteen times. They’ll see sixteen sunrises and sixteen sunsets, sixteen days and sixteen nights.

They all make an association between the earth and a mother, and this in turn makes them feel like children. In their clean-shaven androgynous bobbing, their regulation shorts and spoonable food, the juice drunk through straws, the birthday bunting, the early nights, the enforced innocence of dutiful days, they all have moments up here of a sudden obliteration of their astronaut selves and a powerful sense of childhood and smallness. Their towering parent ever-present through the dome of glass.

Think a new thought, they sometimes tell themselves. The thoughts you have in orbit are so grandiose and old. Think a new one, a completely fresh unthought one. But there are no new thoughts. They’re just old thoughts born into new moments – and in these moments is the thought: without that earth we are all finished. We couldn’t survive a second without its grace, we are sailors on a ship on a deep, dark unswimmable sea.

If she could stay in orbit for the rest of her life all would be well. It’s only when she goes back that her mother is dead; as in musical chairs when there’s one fewer seat than there are humans who need it, but so long as the music plays the number of seats is immaterial and everyone is still in the game. You have to not stop. You have to keep moving.

all beings are living in life-support machines commonly called bodies and all of these will fail eventually.

This one, precarious though it surely is, is limited to its orbiting groove, a place of few surprises, all unforeseens foreseen – watched twenty-four seven, assiduously monitored, obsessively repaired, comprehensively alarmed, thoughtfully padded, few sharp objects, no trip hazards, nothing to fall off. Not the multiple perils of earthly freedom where you roam about quite unmonitored, quite unbounded, beset by ledges and heights and roads and guns and mosquitoes and contagion and crevasses and the hapless criss-cross of eight million species all vying to survive.

And in time we come to see that not only are we on the sidelines of the universe but that it’s of a universe of sidelines, that there is no centre, just a giddy mass of waltzing things, and that perhaps the entirety of our understanding consists of an elaborate and ever-evolving knowledge of our own extraneousness, a bashing away of mankind’s ego by the instruments of scientific enquiry until it is, that ego, a shattered edifice that lets light through.

if we’re not special then we might not be alone.

And now maybe humankind is in the late smash-it-all-up teenage stage of self-harm and nihilism, because we didn’t ask to be alive, we didn’t ask to inherit an earth to look after, and we didn’t ask to be so completely unjustly darkly alone.

The mundaneness of their earth-stuck orbit, bound for nowhere; their looping round and never out. Their loyal, monogamous circling which struck them last night as humbly beautiful. A sense of attention and servitude, a sort of worship.

But what would it be to cast out into space creations that had no eyes to see it and no heart to fear or exult in it?