Orbital

by Samantha Harvey

earth is the answer to every question. The earth is the face of an exulted lover; they watch it sleep and wake and become lost in its habits. The earth is a mother waiting for her children to return, full of stories and rapture and longing. Their bones a little less dense, their limbs a little thinner. Eyes filled with sights that are difficult to tell.

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.

When we’re on that planet we look up and think heaven is elsewhere, but here is what the astronauts and cosmonauts sometimes think: maybe all of us born to it have already died and are in an afterlife. If we must go to an improbable, hard-to-believe-in place when we die, that glassy, distant orb with its beautiful lonely light shows could well be it.

it isn’t so much that they don’t want to go home but that home is an idea that has imploded – grown so big, so distended and full, that it’s caved in on itself.

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.

So strenuously unrobotic is the astronaut’s heart that it leaves the earth’s atmosphere and it presses out – gravity stops pressing in and the counterweight of the heart starts pressing out, as if suddenly aware it is part of an animal, alive and feeling. An animal that does not just bear witness, but loves what it witnesses.

Man’s hubris. A hubris so almighty it’s matched only by his stupidity.

I want to be the kind of person who wants to go to Mars, but I’d go mad on the way, I’d be the one who cracked up and threatened the mission, they’d have to euthanise me for the greater good.

It’s a radioactive soup out there

It’s then that she feels upon her the first complete closing in of grief. Not a stab or punch but something stealthy and suffocating,