Orbital

by Samantha Harvey

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.

Or was she saying: here are some men reaching the moon – do you see or hear a single woman among them, much less a non-white, non-American woman, do you notice that this is a collection of men in the full prime of their masculinity with their rockets and thrusters and payloads and the eyes of the world on them – this is what the world is, a playground for men, a laboratory for men, don’t compete because any attempts at competition will end in your feeling dispirited and inferior and crushed, why run a race you can never win, why set yourself up to fail – so please know, my daughter, that you are not inferior and hold that grandly in your heart and live your inconsequential life as well as you can with a dignity of being, will you do that for me?

we’ll devise a planetary flag because that’s a thing we lacked on earth and we’ve come to wonder if that’s why it all fell apart,