Things Get Better

The lunar valley cradles me. Parallel lines that peak with sharp shadow edges and soft pools of dust that settle in low hollows occupy my nearest vision. This sector is a landscape devoid of color. It blurs to monochrome grey as I stare beyond.

A distance so vast that even though I journeyed it I cannot feel it gapes before me. Everything inside me calls to the void. This ache, this ache. Needles stab outwards from my heart.

I beg for the laws of physics to unravel themselves. For the atoms around me to unleash their quantum rules into our realm. For gravity to abandon its steadfast post, let go its embrace, and allow me to float freely away from it all.

Past my body and the valley, sitting in the middle of the void, the source of this pain: Earth. Earth and what happened there. What is still happening. A puddle of gravity surrounds it, keeping the halo of debris close like a coveted crown.

How did we do this to ourselves? It is the question we've been trying to answer even before it happened. Since before we knew it was possible. And here we are, empty handed.

I scream, the sound isolated inside my helmet; waves crash against its transparent face and back to my ears, a tree falling in a forest.

My god, my god.

My mother would have filled in the rest for me. But she is down there, and I am up here.

Grief suffocates without atmosphere. It is contained to my form and insurmountable because of it. The oxygen I breathe is sterile, unsympathetic.

Somewhere in my mind I hear the training: slow, shallow breaths. Conserve what you have.

Breathe in. Do not think about it. Breathe out. Close your eyes, don't look. In. Feel the moon beneath your feet. Out.

Out. Out.

Alarms begin to sound, messages for me that start as a friendly beep and crescendo to a wailing siren. The monitors attached to my body tell the life sustaining systems that SHE IS NOT OKAY.

I gasp, suddenly desperate, and pull in what now tastes like fresh mountain air. Slowly the cacophony of reminders to live die away again.

A hand touches my shoulder. It is familiar, and I reach up to grasp it with my own thick gloved hand.

"Amy." The voice sounds funny filtered through the radio. Far more serious than how I'm used to hearing it, playing card games at the station, cracking jokes while doing chores, telling stories at dinner.

He sits beside me, staring out into the same void, at the same form of the waning Earth.

"It will be okay."

I almost lose my balance on the ground as I whip around at him, anger gripping me. I want to rip off his helmet and look into his eyes. I want to show him how it will not ever be okay again, how it is over, but all I see is the reflection of the void and the earth in his visor.

As quickly as the anger descended, a wild, chaotic mirth travels outwards. Loud, high pitched hyena laughter bursts from my chest, trapped in my helmet but for the escape over the radio to Ben. He remains motionless.

My laughter consumes minutes, tearing a deep hole inside me. It is gone, it is gone. It is all gone.

And then I am done. What is left in the wake of the grief and the anger and the mania is silence.

"It will be okay." Ben says again.

And in this stillness, I feel it could be true. Maybe not for us, but for someone, someday, somewhere. My breath again comes shallow, slow. Like it should.

I rest my head on Ben's shoulder. He leans on me.

From across the void, I feel it. The soft heartbeat of humanity that has sustained us from the beginning. Its rhythm is slow, but not yet yielding.

Things are bad. They will get better in the same way they get worse. In my bones I know it. Things are as they always were. It is a world without end, without beginning.

Things get better. They get better. They get better.

I close my eyes and breathe in.