Song Fiction No. 3

It's quiet out here.  So very quiet.  When people say that it is silent in space, they can not understand how immensity of silence.  It is the silence of eternity and the tiny noises I make disperse into that endless silence to be forgotten by all.  Looking down on the earth, I can see the clouds hanging over earth and ocean and I can hear my breath going in and out.  It's so still that I can hear the sweat coming out of my pores.

4 hours ago
The door clanged shut behind me and I felt the usual slight adjustments to my vestibular system as I loose the frame of reference of the station behind me.  I love that instant.  It is the instant that you know that you truly outside the bounds of our world.  After 24 hours in an airlock waiting be slowly depressurized, it would be like taking a breath of air after surfacing.

The view always takes my breath away and I pulled myself out of the airlock and positioned myself to slowly shut the hatch door.

Now
I can hear a lot of radio chatter, my emergency thrusters on my suit are drained though.  I'm looking down at the Earth and wondering, what now?  I take a small sip of water and cough slightly.  The voices in the radio go silent.

"We can try to maneuver towards you..."  "There is an option of programming a..."
The voices sound very far away, even with the headset in my ear.

Sometimes you can't explain a series of small accidents and mistakes and you can't recover.  You can only live with the experience and reset your expectations.  In my case, resetting my expectations was turning to face Earth.

She is down there somewhere.  It is probably 2 p.m. and she is picking up our children from school. She doesn't know that our goodbye is happening right now without her.  She is thinking about feeding the kids and maybe letting them play outside since it is the first warm day of spring.  She told me that it would be nice today.  I don't have any doubts about the moments I spent with her anymore.  I don't have any regrets either. She gave me everything I could want.

I cannot do the math to figure if the air will go before the heat arrives.  At some point the suit is going to make me feel so trapped that I will loosen the clasps holding a glove in place.  And then I will be silent.

I stop those thoughts now and I think about the beauty below me and her smile.

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Find out more about #yearofplay by reading the text of this song.  This little piece of fiction is one of the stories that runs through my head as I'm working on the first part of my upcoming work with the "Denver Art Song Project".