We had the dream when we were young. We believed that there might be something in our future. There really would be. It wasn’t just this lonely room, this place of now, more than a lifelong drift toward an abyss, the same from which we had emerged. 
We moved and did, sat and listened, and then hunched, thin, dreams not what they had been, instead looking into a screen, our hope now in that, the expectation, then knowing how we made our-self something we had dreaded, a dream made memory. 
But there is no such thing as regret. Or just a bit.
Tag Archives: isolation
Dead Things in the Street
I can’t move my head. Not even my shoulders. I am pinned, a bright side light on my face and neck.
I am flat and horrible, my eyes wide, stuck against the ground. Stuck there, panicking. I can’t even move my leg. I have no control. I am completely helpless, trapped by monsters, people I don’t know, who have left me here to die, to be tortured and think nothing of it.
I try to close my eyes to make it go away, but it is still there. I can’t move. I want to scream but I can’t even do that. I am stuck in this silence with not even myself, with nothing but my labored miserable loneliness.
(Yeah, I know. I always end with a tree.)
Al Worden: Reflections in Lunar Orbit
While fellow astronauts of Apollo 15 explored the lunar surface, Al Worden piloted the command module. His solo journey in lunar orbit lasted three days.
I didn’t feel lonely or isolated. I was much more comfortable flying by myself than with others. In fact, I most enjoyed the back side of the moon, where Houston couldn’t get hold of me on the radio. 
The moon looked enormous from such a low orbit. I glimpsed tall central peaks of craters before I saw the surrounding low rims. With no atmosphere to soften the view, every crater and boulder was sharp and crisp. 
Mountains cast long slashes of blackness across the landscape, and features stood out as if I had placed a flashlight against a rough stucco wall. The moon was overwhelmingly majestic, yet stark and mostly devoid of color. 
Every orbit, however, I was treated to the sight of the distant Earth rising over the lunar landscape. (Pages 188-92, Al Worden, Falling to Earth.)