[WordShaker]

Well, I guess I'll try something. I've written a few things before, but nothing substantial. This is probably my first venture into trying to write something bigger than a few thousand words. Hopefully, it's worth something.

Staying

Spoiler for Part 1, a working title that is being worked on:

It’s beautiful.

Well, Dusky’s less paraphrased words were a little more profanity-riddled, but this about boils it down to its most basic expression. It’s concise. It’s precise. Meaningful. It’s also less offensive for the prudes among us, but those guys can just pick up and go right now; neither Dusky nor I will make any exceptions for the squeamish. Fuck them.

Are they gone? Good. I can’t stand those types. I wasn’t joking, either. The time spent in space directly correlates with how well and how casually you can slip in a “fuck you” inside normal conversation. It keeps the relationship between friends fresh, you know? Anyway, back to what I was saying.

Dusky and I were on the outside of the station, doing maintenance work. It was a monthly thing, routine—but that, by no means, makes it easy. We’re normally wordless when we’re outside, doing the EVAs, because this work requires absolute concentration. If you lose a screw, you don’t just go around sprawling over the floor to look for it. You don’t catch it, it’s gone. Complete screw up. And you. You’re attached to dear life, your station, with nothing but a glorified tether. Just one mistake and, poof. You are gone. So, normally, we’re wordless.

But, this time, I chanced a look. I looked out onto the endless expanse before me, and, just below—or above, or sideways, or some-sort-of-ways. Space, damn crazy place—was Earth. I don’t know how many times I’ve seen the Earth turn in my entire time up here, or even in a single day inside the station. My patch of dirt wasn’t quite around yet, but, down where I was looking, it was dark. In a sense, anyway. It was nighttime, but the ground below was crossed with deep, thrumming bands of light, a multicolored laser show. There were some small splotches of nothing but a dull black, but these were few and far between; the effects of the urban sprawl. Among these lights were the products of a distinct human ugliness, the fires of some battle, part of a war I knew little and cared less about up here in space. It didn’t matter. This was Earth. All at once, I felt this longing to touch ground, to feel something solid and real, to go home. It was immediate and overwhelming, just a sense that I was somewhere that I didn’t belong and didn’t want to be at. I watched the lights before me, some of them flickering in and out of existence. Between that planet and me was just a nothingness, but it was still so indeterminably far.

I looked over to Dusky, who was just a few meters away. But, even then, we were connected only by our headsets and microphones. On Earth, out of this vacuum, people have real, physical connections with one another. Lingering body heat being whisked away into the air by some concrete rules of physics, the breathing of others, the sounds, the feelings, just the sense that someone is there, maybe sitting on a chair in the café, or reading a newspaper on a sidewalk bench, even if it’s just a complete stranger you don’t know or particularly care about. You can feel that there’s something there. None of that exists inside the suit. Even the act of looking at someone else loses any sense of personality, rendering it a meaningless gesture; even when you know it’s your friend in there, he’s inside a bulky suit, behind an opaque black visor. But, don’t let me get cynical. It’s comforting to know that he’s still around and not floating around in that deep, black expanse I’ve been bashing. Sometimes, even the meaningless gestures can help you retain some sense of yourself. I keyed our connection, the microphone, and a channel of communication cut across the void.

“Hey, Dusky?”
There was a slight pause. Maybe it’s him trying to figure out if he’s actually hearing me and that it’s not just in his head. Then, there’s a crackle of static, and his voice comes out. “Yeah? What?”
“The Earth, Dusky.”
Static. “What about it?”
I started to open my mouth, but I hesitate. Really, what about it? I say the only thing that I can think of. “It looks great from up here, doesn’t it?”

There’s another pause. I like to think that, behind that visor, he was looking at me incredulously, wondering why I was mentioning something that we’d both seen a million more times than infinity, something so mundane. But then he grins. I like to think that. In reality, I just see him turn towards the Earth and take a look, too, and then a chuckle mixed with white noise comes over the microphone.

Yeah.

It’s beautiful.

Paraphrased, of course.