Atmosphere

by Taylor Jenkins Reid

But I think it is also the 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.

My God, she thought, what else can I do?

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. It also brought her some sense of responsibility. And what was kinship but that? Comfort and responsibility.

Supposedly, children are resilient. But Joan suspected this was merely something we tell ourselves because we are terrified they are just as delicate as we are.

Joan had not lost herself to Vanessa, but found herself in her.

“Persistence. Highly underrated in women. Overrated in men, but underrated in women.”

I’m scared of what NASA and everybody else in the world is going to try to tell me I can’t do once I’m a mother. ‘How can you leave your child at home while you’re in space,’ even though fathers have been doing it for, let’s see, over two decades. ‘Should mothers even be in space?’ ‘Who takes care of your child when you’re at work?’ That I’m scared about. But I’m not scared of being a mother.” “Why not?” Joan asked her. “Because it feels good to love someone,” Donna said. “It feels better than anything on this Earth. And I bet better than anything up there.”