A Cosmic Kind of Love(3)

I’d been busy at work finalizing plans for another client’s spring wedding, so I hadn’t had time to look over their emails. I had a lunch meeting with them tomorrow. Hence the late night.

Slamming back coffee, I opened my email and found the couples’ separate replies.

Matthias had sent me a helpful Pinterest board. It had to be the artist in him. Most guys I worked with either didn’t care about the minute details of the event or didn’t know how to communicate what it was they visualized. Clients who were creative, however, were always a godsend because they usually knew how to tell me what they wanted.

While Matthias’s board was straight to the point, I discovered Darcy had sent me a link to an online cloud account where she had several digital folders for me to look at. To my confusion, some folders were named with numbers that read like dates. I opened a folder from a year ago to see it contained a video.

Huh?

Had she sent me YouTube videos for inspiration?

I double-clicked and the video started.

A somewhat familiar man’s face took up most of the screen, but behind him I could see a strange, organized jumble of pipes and wires on a white wall. I could hear a loud hum of machine noise in the background.

“Well, here I am, Darce.” The man grinned into the camera, a glamorous white-toothed smile that caught my attention as if he’d reached out of the screen to curl his hand around my wrist. “I’m on the International Space Station. I still can’t believe it.”





TWO





Chris


ONE YEAR AGO

Staring into the camera on my laptop, I tried to picture Darcy at the other end, and it was more difficult than I’d ever expected. Maybe I was still on sensory overload. I’d been on the International Space Station for six weeks, and my excitement still hadn’t worn off. I didn’t know if it could. All I had to do was look out the window, and I felt a sense of amazement and wonder, like a kid who believed in Santa Claus all over again. My big brother’s boyhood dream of being an astronaut had amazingly come true for me. If he was really watching over me from the surrounding stars, I hoped he knew that this was for him. I hoped he was proud.

“I’ve tried calling,” I said into the camera with a little smirk. “But we keep missing each other. Guess that’s what happens when your girlfriend is an amazing lawyer. I got your emails though.”

Tom, the commander of the Soyuz, and my crew had given me this look the last time I tried to get Darcy on the phone and couldn’t. Tom was the kind of man who could say a thousand things with just one look. Anton, a cosmonaut and our right-seater on the Soyuz had given me a similar look when he’d joined us for dinner the other night. But unlike Tom, who just let a person make up their own mind about things unless their way of thinking would lead to a disaster in space, Anton had said in his thick Russian accent, “You should send a video. Like a letter. People act strange when their loved ones are in a situation they do not understand. Show her what you do here.”

The truth was, I was so involved in the daily tasks set by NASA that I didn’t really allow Tom’s look to sink in until Anton advised me to send a video to Darce. But it was strange. In fact, surely it was a terrible sign she didn’t answer my first call from the ISS or any of my calls in the six weeks since. NASA had assigned an escort to my family to keep Darcy, my father, and my aunt informed of my continued safety. And our arrival on the station was televised, and I’d agreed to send videos and photographs to NASA that they could share on an Instagram account they’d set up for me. I wasn’t a social media kind of guy, but I’d do whatever the PR team thought might bring interest to our mission. They’d posted my arrival to my Instagram. Besides, I had talked to Darcy and my family during a press conference, so they both knew I’d arrived safe and sound.

Still.

It was definitely a little off that Darcy didn’t pick up when I called from goddamn space. Her emails arrived regularly, and she explained she was busy with a massive case against a large corporation for noncompliance with their environmental impact. However . . . Christ, even my father had picked up when I’d called. Yet, it was possible Anton was correct. Perhaps Darcy was more afraid of me being in space than I’d considered. Though we were encouraged to talk it through thoroughly with our loved ones while we trained for a mission and while I knew my aunt was excited but afraid for me, Darcy had seemed . . . fine.

Thrilled to tell people she was dating an astronaut.

She’d even come to Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan for a few days before launch, though her schedule meant she’d had to leave early.

Did she really have to leave early? Or was that just an excuse?

And shouldn’t I care more if it was?

I didn’t say any of this into the video. There was no time or space in my life to feel resentful and confused. For now my focus was on the day-to-day tasks and the greater task of staying alive in space. At any moment something could go wrong on the space station, and my focus needed to be on keeping me, my crew, and the other three astronauts on the station alive. Darcy and I would talk about our relationship in four months when I returned to Earth.

Returned to Earth.

I grinned at the thought and then remembered I was supposed to be making a video letter. “So that zero-gravity training . . . tip of the iceberg, Darce. It’s taken me six weeks to get a handle on moving through the station with some swagger.” I chuckled at that. “I’ve missed handrails, bumped into walls—thankfully not destroying anything because the walls are packed with experiments and wires and pipes. Everything does something. The noise you hear . . . Loud, right?” Hence the reason I had to speak up to be heard. “That’s the fans and the pumps. Everything we need to survive. Keeps us warm and provides us with oxygen. Takes some getting used to. Don’t know if I ever will, to be honest, but it’s worth it for the view. I wish you could see what the world looks like from up here, Darce. The world you’re fighting to protect. I get that more than ever now. It’s so beautiful. I know you asked me in your emails to describe it. . . . For the first time in my life, I wish I was a writer so I could describe it to you the way Tom can. He writes it all down so that . . . you can almost feel what it’s really like to be here. I’ll give it a shot for you though.