Orbital

by Samantha Harvey

The earth, from here, is like heaven. It flows with colour. A burst of hopeful colour. 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.

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.

Remember this, each of them thinks. Remember this.

Can humans not find peace with one another? With the earth? It’s not a fond wish but a fretful demand. Can we not stop tyrannising and destroying and ran-sacking and squandering this one thing on which our lives depend?

It’s utterly manifest in every detail of the view, just as the sculpting force of gravity has made a sphere of the planet and pushed and pulled the tides which shape the coasts, so has politics sculpted and shaped and left evidence of itself everywhere.

The planet is shaped by the sheer amazing force of human want, which has changed everything, the forests, the poles, the reservoirs, the glaciers, the rivers, the seas, the mountains, the coastlines, the skies, a planet contoured and landscaped by want.

In orbit his sense of life is simpler and gentler and more forgiving, not that his thoughts are different but that his thoughts are fewer and more distinct. They don’t avalanche like they used to. They come and they interest him for as long as they need to and then they go.