Atmosphere

by Taylor Jenkins Reid

What started as my attempt to create an interesting backdrop for a love story became the beginning of me understanding my place in the world. You see, once you start observing the night sky, you begin to orient yourself in time and space.

If you can spot the stars Altair, Deneb, and Vega during the summer, you will see that they form a triangle. And that triangle always points south. If you are ever lost, you can find those three and know which way to go.

relief I feel that those stars are immovable.

Nothing you or I could do will ever alter them. They are so much bigger than us. And they will not change within our lifetime. We can succeed or fail, get it right or get it wrong, love and lose the ones we love, and still the Summer Triangle will point south. And in that way, I know everything will be some type of okay—as impossible as that can seem sometimes.

the gold pin. Evidence that she was one of the chosen few humans who have ever left this planet.

shimmering blue of the seven oceans from two hundred miles away. Cerulean? Cobalt? Ultramarine? There was no shade vivid enough that she could name. Ninety-nine point nine percent of human beings who have ever lived have never seen that blue. And she has.

EECOM—electrical, environmental, and consumables management.

The human body—intelligent as it is—was formed in response to the atmosphere of Earth. It would be easy to make the case that humans are ill-equipped to be in space. Whatever led to our design, it was not meant for this. But Joan sees it as the exact opposite. Human intelligence and curiosity, our persistence and resilience, our capacity for long-term planning, and our ability to collaborate have led the human race here.

We are the only intelligent life-form that we know of in our galaxy who has become aware of the universe and worked to understand it. We are so determined to learn what lies beyond our grasp that we have figured out how to ride a rocket out of the atmosphere.

And now Joan is aware of her own breath, her own heart rate. Not because she is afraid of what this mission entails—there is no logical reason to be afraid yet—but because she gets nervous every time she talks to Vanessa Ford.

But knowing that everyone can see her heart rate—that they can see how her body reacts every time Houston speaks up—makes her feel like she has nowhere to hide.

Astronomy was history. Because space was time. And that was the thing she loved most about the universe itself.

most of the stars have been there for so long, burning so bright, that every human generation could have looked up and seen them.