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The death anniversary of January’s mother came a month into his Crossing like a candle-lit flicker. The date flashed when he reached for his phone that morning.
Before then, he’d been lying in bed and thinking of paradoxes.
It was the sort of impossible brain tick that he picked up just sitting around the cafeteria around dinnertime. He’d be hard pressed to label them friends, but he did have the usual seat he gravitated to, and with it came the usual people that also preferred to eat under the cafeteria’s whalebone arches. 1
Some sort of professor of English, or philosophy, or maybe physics, or whichever subject that hired people who loved to argue over existential things, had been talking about them. Feeling puny against the expanse of the universe; the hopefulness of life and the futility of it; how the cake that was being served that evening tasted somehow both garlicky and sweet. A wonder that we contain so many contrary things that clash and divide over and over again and again she’d said, and we still got to move on like nothing. She never really thought she’d get to visit space, never gave it any thought really, but she would never get tired of the view from her port hole every day.
January silently agreed with the professor—some days.
At first, boarding the hulking spaceship had filled him with childlike awe, pinching and cradling him in the midst of titans. He’d never before been near something so swallowing; not even standing next to old sea-faring ships or performing within the grandest of theaters amounted to an eighth of Tharsese space vessels.
January suspected most young boys probably had those far-away dreams of becoming an astronaut and visiting the neighboring planets for the fantasticalness of it all. Even his peers at the Bolshoi had that blooming space craze every once in a while when the news reported on another new development happening in the stars.
Personally, he had never seen the appeal of space exploration, but the weightless part of the travel might have been appealing. He’d heard the detriments, yes, the atrophy to the muscles and bone density, all the important bits that he needed to dance—and yet he couldn’t help but imagine it as he grew up.2 Letting the microgravity transform him into a feather and being able to pirouette endlessly and jeté across the made-up space stage. He’d land as if he never left the air at all, noiseless.
It was that brief moment of shining brilliant in the spotlight, nothing but him and the whole world of a stage, his consciousness expanding into infinity. How he could live his life feeling that countlessly, and still be the smallest thing to exist, to be so unimportant. Faceless in that crowd of people surging onto the ships, he was absolutely nobody. Some dancer who brought joy into people’s lives for just a night, pretending to be the prince, the king, the hero—but really, who was he in comparison to the stagehands who had to flee too, who helped bring his persona to life; teachers, emergency workers, or store clerks who’ve faced more hardships than he ever had to; fathers and mothers who’ve sacrificed so much for their children?
Sacrifice. He didn’t really know much about that. If he were made to sit in a room with all the people who’ve sacrificed so much to get to Mars with that sacrifice made tangible on a platter, his would look paltry, deflated.
January knew what sacrifice looked like. His mother wore it like a secondhand coat that by the time he got to inheriting it, it was just threads. He supposed that was a good thing, that he never got to learn. He had thought that selling his childhood home would have been harder, but it just felt like another step to complete in a dance. You moved away from home, you made it big in your career, your mother passed away. January saw his life as a constant need to move on, and on, and on.
The ship’s engines thrummed deep within the hull like distant whale song. It was less than five feet of titanium between January and the noxious soup of space, seventy million miles between him and earth, eight months until he arrived on Mars. He found himself doing calculations often absentmindedly, measuring the number of things he could count to feel like he had some control over anything. The steps to the cafeteria, the minutes it took to take a shower, the amount of people he knew by name here. He’d even estimate the finite number of spins it took until his ballet slippers unraveled.
Some days—and this was where his disagreement with the professor of English-Philosophy-maybe-Physics lay—he was just sick of everything. Seeing the stars swirl outside was a momentous view. He was able to watch his distant blue dot and its lonely moon orbiting slowly out on the viewing deck, marveling at the clouds swirling along the southern hemisphere towards the tropics. It was a bloody unbelievable chance that he was able to see anything like that at all.
However, watching the unfurling of typhoons and the explosion of far-flung stars only lanced through January everything else he wished he took the time to marvel at before. He counted such things: the orange blossoms outside his flat and how they would be bare things during this time of the season; the panes of glass in the studio that threw the light across the wooden floors; sitting on the dirt and stones, ants marching around his massive figure and a nest of starlings chirping above his head, under the hawthorn tree by his mother’s grave where he caught the sun that passed through the interstices.
He'd have given up looking at stars and celestial bodies forever if he could have had one more day of any of that.
It had been forty-five days since he left earth. Inside him was a kaleidoscope of longing, of hope, of excitement, of dread—each facet twisting to take over his entire being one day and then disappearing the next.
In bed, staring at the black screen of his phone after glimpsing the date, January listened to the ship sing on. If he were still at home, he would have taken a trip down to Cornwall, maybe picked up some carnations on the way, and cleaned off the headstone. He wiped absentmindedly at his phone.
His glasses were still back at his flat in London.
January teased the bed-headed strands of his hair and frowned. He hadn’t been taking as good care of it as he should have. Though, given his situation, he’d say he was doing his bloody best and he should be considered a masterclass in adapting to the shittest situations. On the never-ending “What January Wished He Brought If He Knew He Was Leaving Earth Forever” list, among those were his hair products. His dark ends got frizzy and uncontrollable when left unattended.
He’ll have to cut it soon. It was getting longer.
1. It reminded him of being trapped in a giant’s ribs, like the World Trade Center train station when he had visited New York City after being invited to the NYCB’s Spring Gala. The ship imitated the day and night cycle as if the sun and moon were peeping through the interstices, but it carried a sterileness to it, like hospital walls.
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2. The space talk always made its way into every conversation some way or another when you had a whole other city up there and the immigration rates were rising every year. You couldn’t tune in to the news without hearing about a terrible natural disaster, some influencer’s thoughts and prayers about said disaster, or the Martian colony.
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