Atmosphere

by Taylor Jenkins Reid

Astronomy was history. Because space was time. And that was the thing she loved most about the universe itself. When you look at the red star Antares in the southern sky, you are looking over thirty-three hundred trillion miles away. But you are also looking more than five hundred and fifty years into the past. Antares is so far away that its light takes five hundred and fifty years to reach your eye on Earth. Five hundred and fifty light-years away. So when you look out at the sky, the farther you can see, the further back you are looking in time. The space between you and the star is time.

“I’ve always felt like, when I look at the stars, I am reminded that I am never alone,” she said. “Really?” Vanessa said. “How?” “Well, we are the stars,” Joan said. “And the stars are us. Every atom in our bodies was once out there. Was once a part of them. To look at the night sky is to look at parts of who you once were, who you may one day be.” As she said it, Joan could tell how lonely it must sound. To find companionship with the stars. But what she meant was bigger than that. Being human was such a lonely endeavor. We alone have consciousness; we are the only intelligent life force that we know of in the galaxy. We have no one but one another. Joan was always moved by the fact that everything—all matter on Earth and beyond, up past the atmosphere, going as far as the edges of the universe, as it expands farther and farther away from us—is made from the same elements. We are made of the same things as the stars and the planets. Remembering that connection brought Joan comfort.

Except on those perfect nights when, after saying goodbye at the bar or Frenchie’s or driving home separately from a barbecue, there would be a soft, perilous knock on Joan’s door an hour later. God, that sound. The knowledge that the part of Joan’s day that was in black and white had ended, and color was about to bleed in and flood her night.

This probably wasn’t what an astronaut looked like to most people. But she was one, and she was going up into space. So the definition was going to have to change.

“Hard to believe any one person has any significance,” he said. “I knew that before, but I never knew it, until now. Human life is…meaningless.” Joan looked at him. How was it that two people, right next to each other, given the rarest of perspectives, could draw two totally opposite conclusions? When Joan looked back at the Earth, she was overwhelmed with her own life’s meaning—and the fact that the only meaning it could have was the meaning she gave it.