Poem: Space

This poem contains no content warnings other than a non-explicit mention of sex. It was written on the 30th March 2022 and I am, to be honest, pretty pleased with it, even if I'm not 100% settled on the title.

Space:

I’ve always been terrified of space.

Not as a general concept, nor one specific

thing – more like a dozen things, one after

another. The idea of being trapped inside

a rocket ship haunted my childhood nightmares,

all lights and noise and bellowed instructions

from an unseen advisor speaking a language

I did not understand;

black holes consumed me with the same

obsession normally reserved by children for

quicksand, waiting for one to appear

in the sky above my head the way one

might be certain there are invisible sharks

in any swimming pool;

the idea, simply and most terrifying of all,

of drifting through the infinite, nowhere to go

and nothing to hold onto, nothing to use to

pull myself back down to the planet, condemned

to millennia of the void.

 

As much as I loved to look at the stars, the idea

of being among them brought no comfort. I had

to stop staring at them for years at one point,

so certain did I become every time I turned

my eyes skyward that I could feel gravity giving

up on me, surrendering me to that black

sky, offering me like a sacrifice to keep everyone

else down to Earth.

 

We were both adrift in the void when our

outstretched hands brushed each other, our fingers

quickly intertwining clumsy through the gloves

of our spacesuits, the same instinct that

gives babies the strength to hang from washing lines,

that makes newborn monkeys cling to their mother’s

fur as they swing a mile above the unforgiving

ground. We knew that we were not in this journey

together from hereon, that whatever our unknown

destinations, this was merely a pretty diversion

amongst the stars. If candlelight is romantic,

what can being in the same sky that stargazers

stare into do?

We danced for a moment, hand-in-hand, using

each other’s momentum to enact a spin that had

more purpose than any movement we had been

able to make in months. You laughed at some

joke only you could hear; I said you were cute

when you laughed, staring into my reflection

in the impassive glass of your helmet.

We both told lies for a little while, well aware

of what we were doing while we slid them in

between promises that we would be more

honest than we had ever been before.

I knew that you could not be telling the truth

both when you said,

I couldn’t bear to see you with someone else,

and, I think we should keep seeing other people,

but I nodded and agreed politely along

with the hum of the life support in

my spacesuit, running calculations on how

much oxygen I had left.

 

We pretended to kiss, our helmets clanging

softly together with the sound of a child

knocking on the glass of an aquarium. I

imagined the sign next to the tank,

quickly glanced over out of politeness by guests

then abandoned in favour of more impressive

viewing: The North Pacific Train Wreck.

Habitat: the bathypelagic, or midnight, zone.

Diet: scavenged detritus. Conservation status:

critically endangered.

 

When it was polite, we engaged in

a pantomime of coitus, not actually

trying to share the atmosphere inside

our suits at all, but going through the motions

of it. I did not take my socks off

(of course not – how would one even

get them off from inside a spacesuit?)

and I’m sure you, equally, broke some of

your own personal rules around the whole

affair. We both agreed that we did not

know what we wanted

but that this had been nice, we should do

this again sometime. And then, after checking

our watches and mumbling about

having somewhere to be, we gently let go,

both of us pretending it was not terrifying

to be adrift and alone in the infinite void

again, both of us well aware we had

too much tendency to cling on like baby

monkeys to things that were not good for us.

I called out that I hoped

to see you again sometime, perhaps

in orbit around some distant star; we were

moving in opposite directions again, and

I pretended to not know that the only

way you would swing back around to me was

if you found someone else’s momentum

to spin with. I do not know what you called

back or what you secretly hoped and pretended

not to know, because I had bigger black

holes to worry about. So I went back

to gazing at the stars around me, finding

freedom for the first time in the realisation

that nothing worse could happen when gravity

had already given me up.

 

[Image ID: a digital painting of two astronauts holding hands and dancing in a starry space scene, with orange, purple, and blue tones. The stars are reflected in their helmets. There is a glass sheen over them and they are surrounded by a bronze border and dark wall with a bronze plaque, making it appear that they are behind the glass in an aquarium. In the foreground is the silhouette of a young girl knocking on the glass. End ID]