Letter to be Sent by Comet

Dear pilot of mine,

It’s not as if I’ll ever send this, because it’s merely self-indulgent crap written on a coffee break. The others don’t know what I’m doing, and they won’t look over my shoulder, either, because I’m an administrator and you don’t do that to administrators. Not even those who have had so many cups of coffee (espresso, too) already that their hands are starting to shake.

It’s a bit hard to type but this is for you, dear.

We both know by now that it was all lies that they told us. Not that they meant to lie to us, or anything, it just turned out that way – because we all really believed this was the future of humanity, didn’t we? I suppose so. I certainly did. Fifteen when I came out here, young and naïve and full of my own petty problems, and I thought the stars would bring miracles. We all did. You could see it in each fresh load of students they brought in. And they’d sit in their classrooms for hours on end and pay impossibly good attention, charting their tangent curves oh-so-carefully on their computers. Astrophysics: the very word brought that shine to their eyes. Astrobiology. Give any word the prefix that means “star” and those kids will fall for it, every one.

I was one of them.

And it’s been twenty years now, and if I were being flippant I’d say I’ve dulled somewhat. Cynical creature, to look at me, hooked on coffee and on bad escapist fiction, stories no one has read for hundreds of years. Stories where the starships shoot away to distant galaxies, and find glorious things there, forests of alien species, and begin diplomatic relations, and people find each other without even trying. As if the gravity of the planets engineered it. Love: yes, it’s simple, it’s only science; these unwavering forces will keep us together.  

Gravity, gravity, gravity.

Now we are kept here eternally floating, stationed at the edge of a dead planet that serves only as a checkpoint, for the ships that are still trying to go beyond. Everyone here knows they’ll never make it. Look at this planet, look at it: a mindless lump of rock. They mined out the ore and that was it.

Oh, I know you’re out there. I see your face in each of the passing lights that flashes by my window. Shooting stars? Ships seeking a safe port? You’ll always have a safe port here, you know. And yet I don’t know if you’ll ever stay. Fast as those flashes of light, and just as impermanent, you are, like everything.

There was a time, though, it didn’t feel like that: it felt like forever, we did, vast and unchanging as the universe outside the window. You’ve got pilot’s hands and pilot’s eyes, and the thing about pilots is that sometimes you think they can stay. Very brown eyes, very clear, and trustworthy behind the outward swagger. I trusted you enough for it to cause me to trust the whole universe, once upon a time. So if you put the switch down it stays down – the switch that keeps you alive. No need to check it twice, thrice, twelve times. So if your hand can hold mine like this right now it will still do the same tomorrow.

Tomorrow isn’t full of blades and gray and nothingness, not empty, like now, but full of warmth and red and glow like the victory lights. The ones we were to shoot up into the air if we found something worthwhile, out here. We never got to send them.

I’ll send you this letter by comet, on second thought: I’ll be silly and romantic and I’ll watch it arc across the sky with a tail glowing like a promise.

I promise you we’ll be together forever.

Space is a lonely little city, you know.

Goodnight.

M.

P.S. It’s morning, and on Earth the sun will be wheeling its cycle around again. The stars are blinking at me the same as ever. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean this letter to sound like that. So harsh and dismissive and indifferent. I think I’m fading. Oh dear God, who can say what means anything anymore? Who can say whether we meant anything? How can I know, now, that I didn’t dream you?

It’s easy to dream up a pilot, just like it’s easy to dream that the stars will bring you hope.

Your eyes were real, though, I think. They existed. Once.

If I close my eyes and dream long enough I can see us both existing, together, as if it could work, as if it were possible, as if that were the only possible way to be.