“I miss you,” she says quietly. At this very window, she’d sit for hours, not moving, her eyes searching the heavens. Out there was the rural sky, so full of stars, and him.
This was better than the city with its noisy crowds and department stores. All those televisions flickering into the late hours. City people simply couldn’t see the stars, not like she could now. The swishes of light seemed brighter on damp autumn evenings, didn’t they?
She remembered listening to him tell the story of his upcoming transit with such precision. Nightly, stories were coaxed from him, even though she knew them all beat-by-beat. It was his voice she wanted to hear—so clear, so measured in cadence. He’d raise his long fingers, point out the Gods and their lesser constellations, and say their names with such reverence.
She knew that out there, he would pause and look back. With his visor down to block the brilliant sun, he’d see the Earth as a tiny drop of blue, getting ever smaller. In time, he’d only be able to imagine the place he once called home. But she understood that this dirt and rock were transient for him. His life was meant to be lived somewhere deep, beyond the charted cosmos. She wanted that for him.
With a squint into the void, she imagined him out there, alone in his tin can—tumbling and floating. For a moment, she felt as if she could see him, daring to push further from reach. She paused, the thought both thrilling and terrifying.
His voice was thin but firm as the radio waves carried a last message, “Tell my wife I love her very much.”
She knew.
* * *
Music to read by: Space Oddity by David Bowie
Backstory
I’ve had a rough version of this sitting around for a while. Like with When We Arrive it has roots in music as a companion piece.
Two lines from Bowie’s Space Oddity always struck me as odd:
Tell my wife I love her very much
She knows
First, they seemed like throwaway lines in a song of mostly technical details (sung with a wee bit of existential dread). The second is in cadence, “she knows” comes almost on top of the previous line. As if the respondent – we’ll assume NASA – just blurts it out to appease the astronaut: There, there, Major Tom.
In any case, I thought Mrs. Tom might have a few thoughts of her own, melancholy as they might be. And don’t think for a minute I didn’t consider throwing in some twist like: Mrs. Tom knows about his affairs and her last line is the revelation. I can hear my wife call me out, “you always like a twist!” A-ha! Not this time.
Instead, I went more dutiful and, sure, a little schmaltzy, too. But, I hopefully left enough ambiguity as to why she’d want that for him. After all, did she know the circuits would go dead after saying he loves her?
Such a lyrical line: " Out there was the rural sky so full of stars, and him." Before your explanation at the bottom, my engaged imagination took this little story somewhere completely different. It was a reminder to me that our readers interpret our words as they will, and it is not always where we intended.
As I was reading it the song "Brandy" came to mind about a girl in a small coastal town who fell in love with a sailor who, she knew, loved the sea more than her. She would listen rapt to his sailor stories... but would never have him.