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You could develop your personality your entire life—pursue the things you wanted to learn, discover the most interesting parts of yourself, hold yourself to a certain standard—and then you marry a man and suddenly his personality, his wants, his standards subsume your own?
“Of course we look for the gods there,” Vanessa said. “And if we make it up there, we’re going to have to fight against that sneaking suspicion that we might just be gods ourselves.” If Joan could have been pressed harder into the Earth, if gravity was variable, this would have flattened her. Did Vanessa know that, on some level, Joan could not resist the idea that to go up there would be to touch God? That Joan could not help but wonder if, among the stars, there would be answers to questions no human had yet found?
It seemed so clear to Joan, as crazy as it might be, that the meaning of life had to be up there, somewhere.
Jimmy had been told from a young age that fear and failing and trying and wanting and openness and kindness and sincerity made him weak. And because he had believed it, he’d learned to suppress all of those things. And when he saw those traits in others, he hated them because he hated himself.
I’ve only ever really loved one thing. Being in the sky. But I look at you, and you are so curious about everything. Not just about the planets and galaxies and the stars. But Earth. About the people on it. That’s what I admire.” “My curiosity?” “Your commitment to the world around you. How much you care. You are so thoughtful. About everything.”
Love in the sense that she would always be on his side, even if he was wrong, in the sense that he was one of the people on this Earth she believed in. And in that moment, the swelling in her heart was unbearable. Absolutely unbearable.
No one had ever touched Joan so delicately there, and Joan knew that, while she could not predict what would happen to them, for the rest of her life she would think of that area of her body as belonging only to Vanessa.
“Because I do not believe there is any original sin in any of us and I cannot sit there and listen to someone say there is. I don’t want to believe in any being who would judge and punish like that. And I’ll pay the price if I’m wrong and God does exist. Because I will not submit to a God like that willingly.”
“As scientists we call that symbiosis, and it is a consequence of evolution. But the natural consequences of our connections to each other—that’s God, to me. I believe in it because I can see it with my own eyes. I know it exists. But I also believe in it because I want to believe in it. I want to spend my energy thinking not of how my actions might be frowned upon by a man in the sky, but how my actions affect every living and non-living thing around me. Life is God. My life is tied to yours, and to everyone’s on this planet. How does that not instantly make us more in debt to one another?
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Just the act of falling in love was to agree to a broken heart.
Joan wanted to love Vanessa in a way that never made her give up what she wanted. That never changed her.
Joan felt, so acutely, that the incurable problem with life was that nothing was ever in balance. That she could not have toddler Frances and fifth-grade Frances at the same time. She could not meet adult Frances and have a moment to hold baby Frances all at once. You could not have a little of everything you wanted.
How entirely undemanding of yourself it was to believe that everything happened to you. And everything was about you. And that your feelings were the only ones that mattered. Worse yet, to afford yourself the role of the victim always—regardless of how grotesquely it required you to twist reality—so that you never had to look in the mirror and admit you were the perpetrator.
“Listen. It’s okay. We asked for so much, didn’t we? We wanted to touch the stars, and look what we did. There’s nothing more we could ask from the universe, or this God you always talk about, than that. So it’s okay. It’s fine. Okay, Joan? For me, as long as you all know what you meant to me, it all worked out fine.”
If you are interested in learning more about NASA, the space shuttle program, astronomy, or astrophysics, here are some of the books I loved reading during the writing of this novel. Shuttle, Houston: My Life in the Center Seat of Mission Control by Paul Dye Apollo 13 by Jim Lovell and Jeffrey Kluger The New Guys: The Historic Class of Astronauts That Broke Barriers and Changed the Face of Space Travel by Meredith Bagby The Six: The Untold Story of America’s First Women Astronauts by Loren Grush The Milky Way: An Autobiography of Our Galaxy by Moiya McTier Cosmos by Carl Sagan The Art of
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