A Cosmic Kind of Love(4)
“Nighttime is my favorite. It’s mesmerizing. All the lights . . . sometimes it looks like gold dusted across black marble. Other times the lights are fiercer, like fire burning across the surface of a black river. I think daytime would be your favorite though. Blues and greens and silvers and grays and purples and then suddenly rusts from the desert, smog over the cities, and the rivers of the Amazon can seem like liquid gold. It’s an ever-changing landscape. I’ve been in the Cupola only a few times—that’s the observatory module.” The Cupola was my favorite place on the station. Through its trapezoidal windows, it provided a 360-degree view of Earth.
“To enter it, you dive into it and then pull yourself up, like diving into a cave. There are cameras in there so we can take photographs. NASA assigned me to take some a couple of days ago, and they posted them to my Instagram so you can check them out. Good thing I got a handle on zero gravity. Some of those cameras are expensive.” I joked; everything on the ISS was expensive. The station weighed in at a million pounds and was the most expensive object ever built.
“Tom said, on his last mission, they captured a space aurora. I’ve seen the photos, but I’d kill to see that in real life.” The green lights over the planet looked like something out of a science fiction movie.
“You asked a lot about zero gravity. Well, it’s like learning to fly, except everything is effortless, you know. It took me a while to get a handle on it because I kept putting too much force into everything. You don’t need to. Darce, you’d love it. When we’re not spending hours every day on experiments, trying to figure out how to make a spaceship that can venture farther into space while keeping humans healthy and alive, we’re having fun.”
It was the truth. My father would look down on that. Nothing in life worth doing is fun. He’d said that a lot to me when I was growing up. When I was nineteen, I’d finally quipped back, You’ve never had great sex, then. My father didn’t care if I was in college. He’d smacked me across the head so hard my ear throbbed for hours afterward.
“Sometimes I’m pulling myself through the ship and I’ll look into a station and there’s one of the Europeans just tumbling and pirouetting on their downtime.” I grinned because it was not uncommon to find me doing the same thing. In fact, four days ago, I’d videoed myself doing just that and sent it to NASA; they added a Bowie track to it and posted the video. It was a hit with social media users. Apparently I’d gone viral two days ago and had accumulated thousands of new followers within hours.
“Here’s something cool for you.” I reached out for a water pouch I’d strapped to the wall. I’d tucked my feet under a handrail, my back against the wall for support. “I’m in node two,” I thought to tell Darcy. “The sleep station. My pod is just down in the floor over there.” I pointed off camera at the pod that held my sleeping bag. The bag was tied to the wall, and we just zipped ourselves up in there. “Sleeping in zero gravity is what I imagine sleeping on a cloud is like. It looks weird, like we’re wrapped up in a cocoon, but it’s the best sleep of my life. Still, enough of making you jealous of my incredible sleeping habitation . . . As requested, water in space.”
I chuckled as I carefully opened the pouch and squeezed a little water out. It formed into a bubble that danced in the air in front of me with a wiggle. Placing the closed pouch back on the wall, I gently tapped the water bubble toward the camera and then tapped it back and forth between my fingers.
“Cool, huh?” Then I reached forward and sucked it into my mouth. “I just drank my own piss, Darce. Yes, yes, I did.” I laughed, imagining the disgusted look on her beautiful face. “Don’t worry, it’s purified. Our purification system turns our sweat and urine into water. Clever, right?” I wouldn’t tell her I rarely allowed myself to think about the pee part or I might dehydrate.
“Anyway, I could bore you for hours about the work I’m doing up here, but I have to get to node three. That’s where we do our mandatory workouts. It’s part of our daily routine to strap ourselves into the stationary bike or the treadmill. There’s also the ARED, which is a special machine they built so we can do the equivalent of weightlifting and squats. . . . It’s my time to work out, and NASA wants me to film it for social media. But I just . . . I wanted you to know I’m okay. I’m better than okay. I might even get to do my first space walk soon. So yeah . . .” I trailed off awkwardly, wondering how to end the video. The disconnection from Darcy suddenly felt more about emotion than the 240 miles between the ISS and Earth’s surface.
“I hope you’re well.” I winced inwardly at how formal I sounded. “That your parents are well and that the case is going great. Let me know how it’s going. Send a video back if you have time. But if you do, send it to KateD—all one word—at NASA dot gov. She’ll pass it on in a format that’s easier to download. I miss your gorgeous face. Talk soon, Darce.”
I reached out to stop recording. I emailed the video to Kate, who would pass it on to Darcy for me. While we could email and talk on the phone to everyone outside of NASA via a satellite relay with Mission Control in Houston, our connection was slower than on Earth, so it was just easier to send bigger data files directly to NASA to pass on or upload to our socials.
After stowing my laptop securely in my sleeping pod, I used the handrails to pull me out of node 2 so I could head to node 3 to work out. To do so, I had to pass through the US lab. It was then I remembered Darcy had asked me in her last email if I was lonely, and I hadn’t answered her question in my video. It was something I think many people assumed about being up in the ISS. I didn’t have time to feel lonely. I asked Tom about it, and he said he’d never felt less alone than when he was on the station. Maybe that should have been my immediate answer.