Written By: Dasia Brown

Welcome to complete isolation, you think.

This is what you’ve been looking for, what you think about all of the time. Your eyes can’t focus on any single thing in front of you as you look into this vast ocean in which anything meaningful that humanity has lost has been tossed into, forever lost in the cosmos. You are faced with the very inner workings of your soul displayed around you in a whirlwind of colors and idiosyncratic systems of lights beyond your comprehension. You marvel at the fact that you have been transported somewhere beyond the very scope of your reality and you are here alone.

tap. tap. tap.

Your helmet clinks against the starling silver edge of the only window of the ship. Your beautiful silence and solitude is interrupted. Your eyes linger on the control center two steps away, expecting to see some kind of system error.

tap. tap. tap.

You begin to move, temporarily knocked out of your daze, and start examining the cabin innards.

It almost sounds as if something is ticking, like a bomb or a woodpecker (both of which you know did not leave Earth with you). You hear it again, tap. tap. tap. Your ears begin to heat with panic, if something is wrong with the ship, you’ll implode. You’ve seen enough documentaries in your life to know that much.

tap. tap. tap.

tap. tap. tap.

tap. tap. tap.

You stop. The noise is coming from outside of the ship.

You fail at trying to remove your helmet, the screw top seems to be incompatible with the slippery traction between your gloves and the glass. This is not like the suits from your research.

It almost feels…fake? Before you can even panic about being trapped in this rubber monster, you hear the tapping again. It’s getting louder. You return to the sliver of a window attempting to catch a glimpse of the ship’s shell but instead, you are immediately met with the sight of another helmet.

Their suit looks much more realistic as if it’s been hardened in plaster. Your flight-or-fight response chooses ‘freeze’ and you remain stuck in your eye-lock. They startle you with an abrasive tapping of their index finger right between your eyes, I know you see me.

You thought your window was more tinted than it is, so this is disconcerting. You don’t want to let this thing out of your sight. You see enough to know that there is another person in there or something like a person. It asks with its eyes to come inside, continuing to tap as they stare.

When you squint, there is something that shoots through your whole body, the kind of connection that can only be felt between two humans. You let it in.

When it enters, it embraces you upon contact, wrapping itself benignly around you, thank you.

You stare not only because you don’t know what it will do next but because you find this whole situation strangely alluring. You can’t really tell if it is human.

Is it like you? Is it lost?

It presses some kind of button under its chin that only releases some of the tinting that surrounds its head. It wants you to see it but in a somehow identity-preserving way. You examine it when it does. Oh, you think, not an ‘it’, a she.

Her eyes are constantly darting back and forth in her head, like two marbles jumbling around a glass jar. Her skin looks almost translucent, like as if you were to squint, you would be able to see through her. And just a minute ago, when her ‘arm’ swarmed like a vine around the skin of your suit you felt her cold, poisonous aura. You regret letting her inside.

When she opens her mouth, she says the first thing you’ve heard in weeks. (Weeks? How long have you been here? Do you remember your name?)

“What is your name?”

And you don’t know what to say. You haven’t heard the sound of your own voice in so long it seems that you have forgotten it. Her voice, on the other hand, is vibrational. You feel it shake your body but stop your heart. All this happens even though her noise is muffled by the crackling speaker attached to the rim of her suit. Her helmet is still minutely tinted but you’d assumed the speaker is where her mouth might be, which is…not where a human mouth is usually placed.

You distrust her even more. Why do you have a speaker? You can’t even hear sound out there.

Who else have you been talking to?

She interrupts your thoughts, registering that you don’t have the answer to her question, so she asks another, “Who are you? How did you get all the way out here, space stranger?”

You like the sound of that, space stranger. You don’t know her and she doesn’t know you but you are in space together. You try to put that into words.

“Are you human?”, is all that made it out.

“I am everything. Anything,” she says blithely. “So are you.”

You have seen it, this everything. It’s what you came for. You already know this sight will never leave you, along with the strings of radio silence. You feel as if you’ve been suffering as a mechanism of flesh and blood when your calling is to live as an atom, among the symphony of atoms dying in space.

You ask more. “Where did you come from?”

She makes a face that tells you that the next thing out of her mouth will be a lie, “A fallen star.

I’m still wandering, trying to find it. I just found you first.”

She speaks too fluently to be an alien. Her inflections almost make it seem as if she is the same age as you, somewhere between the twenty-somethings and the thirty-blues. Whatever she is, she isn’t old. She’s also clever. Conniving enough to be deceitful about something that you don’t know about yet.

You can’t trust a stray dog, they’ll do anything to have a bed.

She keeps talking, always filling your beautiful astral silence with chatter. You close your eyes and scold yourself for opening the hatch. Why do you, as someone who obviously wants to be left alone, keep an open door?

“I asked you how you got out here but I already know. The cosmos only pulls those souls who call to it. The real question is, why did you?”

☆☾☆☾☆☾☆☾☆☾☆☾☆☾☆☾☆☾☆☾☆☾☆☾☆☾☆☾☆☾☆☾☆☾☆☾☆☾☆☾☆☾☆☾☆☾☆☾

When you first learned of Alpha Centari, you were only in fourth grade. When you were a skittish squirrel of a boy, something as powerful as outer space entirely consumed your little neurodivergent mind. You sat in front of your stepdad’s television replaying the same astronomy VHS documentaries again and again; you would wait until he was asleep to do so. You learned this lesson after he trashed your Rossfield High School books that you started borrowing after your reading level surpassed both the elementary and middle school libraries. Mom comforted you by spending the last of her second-week paycheck to replace them and found a spot in your room to keep things like that. Mom said that he just didn’t understand your passions, that he has country dreams. You knew what she was really saying: your stepfather was insecure about his intelligence and never failed to take that out on you.

Your mother always supported your passion, though. You asked for that Celestron NexStar 8SE telescope advertised in those documentaries for Christmas. You knew it was expensive, but you never asked for much and you knew your mother had been saving up. This didn’t combat the guilt you felt when you actually received it, though.

When Mrs. Ruiz asked your class to bring in posters for the solar system unit, you were ecstatic.

Of course, this was back when Pluto was still considered a planet and Pluto was your favorite one. It reminded you of yourself in a positive way for once. Your absolute favorite thing about space was outside of our solar system though, the collection of stars you saw on your latest documentary tape. It is essentially its own star system and you were enamored by it. You stayed up all night, your mom did too after her back-to-back 12-hour shifts at the hospital. She even straightened the collar of your Polo and told you that you were the bravest boy she knew when you were scared the morning of your presentation.

“Up next…” Mrs. Ruiz pointed to you with the eraser end of her pencil instead of saying your name. You weren’t necessarily her favorite student and you knew that. You weren’t anyone’s favorite.

Scattered applause littered the air as you opened your tri-fold poster board and lifted a single finger to what was written in your mom’s large printed bubble letters:

Alpha Centauri

You read it out to the sea of bored faces before you and then continued down the poster, “Alpha Centauri is the 3rd brightest star in our night sky” you exercised caution before pronouncing the next phrase, “- an amalgamation-”. Your mom was the one who wrote it. She’s very smart, she said she’s where you get it from. You heard some chuckles and murmurs so you knew you missed your mark.

You tried to finish, “...the nearest star system to our sun.”

Before you could go on, Ms. Ruiz raised her hand in a silencing motion, I’ve heard enough.

You stared in an abrupt silence as tears started to swell up in the corners of your eyes.

She walked to the front of the classroom, “You were supposed to pick something from our solar system,” she frowned as she paced around you, “you were supposed to pick from the list.”

“I know..” this came out whinier than intended, “I just really wanted to show this to the class and-”

She rolled her eyes, “You wanted to? I know you didn’t make this project on your own. Too many ‘big kid’ words.”

“I did! I learned it on my own on TV! And my mom-”

A few boys in the back of the class began jeering, we don’t care! They always picked on you and your nerdier qualities, so this was to be expected. But this compiled onto your teacher’s disapproval was the sewing pin that popped the balloon. You started crying.

“Sorry. Rules are rules. Go ahead and take your board and go sit down.”

But you didn’t sit down. You knocked over your board with a single blow, sending it into your cruel teacher’s hip. You bursted into the hallway allowing a string of green snot to trickle down onto your shirt as you escape to the bathroom.

They were right. Why should they care? Fourth graders are supposed to be talking about tag at recess or their favorite PBS shows. Why were you always talking about space? Real space?

Beyond our solar system. Why do you like ‘big kid’ things? This is why nobody likes you. What is wrong with you that everyone else seems to have right?

You never made it to the concluding sentence of your board.

You said it out quietly in the handicapped stall, “Humans will never reach Alpha Centauri. It would take over a lifetime of travel.”

In all truth, it wasn’t the star that you loved, but this very concept. The idea of something being so far away that your experience with it can only ever be hypothetical. You wondered about how things were before the ‘Big Bang’, which is heavily mentioned at the start of each of the documentaries. They say the natural state of the universe is silent and dark. Before there is anything else, the only constant that exists is the quiet peace of the cosmos. You couldn’t think very critically about such a complex existential concept such as this at 9 years old but you heard it enough to where it stayed with you. The fact that your existence as a human defies the natural order of things. You are a wrong thing in a wrong place.

As the tears continued to stream and you tried to stifle your gasps, you only longed for the silence of the stars.

☆☾☆☾☆☾☆☾☆☾☆☾☆☾☆☾☆☾☆☾☆☾☆☾☆☾☆☾☆☾☆☾☆☾☆☾☆☾☆☾☆☾☆☾☆☾☆☾

You don’t actually answer the space stranger’s question. You think that you don’t want to bore her with your long and depressing backstory but you think again that you just feel that way because you don’t want her to know you. You want to stay strangers.

You ask what you’ve been thinking since you’ve met, “Can we just be quiet?”

“Why?

“I came here for quiet.” You take an annoyed sharp breath, “And time alone if I’m being honest.”

She slumps over for about 30 seconds of peace before you hear her shuffling about the cabin again. The second you turn your head, you see her smash the triangle button by the entrance hatch. Your eyes widen as the hatch flies open and the vacuum pulls at both you and the stranger.

You grab onto the sidings of the ship, yelling at her to undo this somehow. She hears none of it; there is no sound out here. Your eyes fall behind you and you notice she secretly attached the connection tube to you when you weren’t paying attention, you let go and float with her. For a second, you start to panic, thinking that this is her revenge on you for being rude to her but she’s not doing anything to you. She’s just pointing at different stars in your view for you to see, she just wants you to look. And you relax and wonder why you limited yourself by only looking through that tiny window. There is so much to see.

You look at her and say with your eyes, I love this.

Stay, a smile creeps out from her teeth.

You don’t think she can understand you, but she can. You think, I’ll stay. I’ll stay forever.

You mean it. What is there on Earth that is better for you than this?

But you temporarily think of home. The dying blue marble floating around filled with sentient ape-descended beings whose only purpose is to run around hurting each other. There are some good ones though, but they die. Like your mom.

You look back at the planet before you, which looks as if it is Earth’s moon if it is dressed like Saturn. But you are not in your solar system so you know that it’s not. This is such a beautiful sight, you have never seen anything like this before, except maybe from the staticky screen of the TV.

When you look back at the stranger, you feel the same feeling of love and beauty. In this moment you feel that love for the stranger, but she makes you feel confused. She makes you insecure about your mortality. She is eternal but you are mortal who is destined to perish. She has taught you so much and you can’t return any of it.

How do you give back to the universe?

You could live forever too, you hear from her.

You remember when you left your body but you don’t think that you died. She reassures you that you’re not dead. But she does tell you that the longer your subconscious stays separate from your body, the weaker you’ll get. But dying can be beautiful. You’ll get to stay, there is a begging tone that underscores her thoughts.

Your heart stops when you piece everything together. She was lying to you! She’s not from a star or even from space. This is what happened to her, she’s confessing. She’s dead. If you stay here any longer, your body will die, along with any opportunities you have for genuine connection.

The stranger isn’t real, nothing out here is. You think about your mom, who died with dreams waiting to be lived. You can search the universe for all time and never find her. Things change and shift too quickly. It’s suddenly making you very dizzy.

Her helmet snaps in your direction; she knows that you know.

☆☾☆☾☆☾☆☾☆☾☆☾☆☾☆☾☆☾☆☾☆☾☆☾☆☾☆☾☆☾☆☾☆☾☆☾☆☾☆☾☆☾☆☾☆☾☆☾

You remember when your mom picked you up from school that day. She picked you up early as soon as she got the phone call at work when a teacher came to pull you out of the bathroom. At home, she rubbed her soft fingers across your puffy under-eyes and anointed your reddened skin with cocoa butter. She told you that you can’t make anyone understand you and that most of the time, people just aren’t going to. They aren’t wired that way, at least not anymore. She told you that it’s okay to be a person that people don’t understand. Only now, you wish that she’d told you how to go on living after the one person who does just dies. No preparation, just death.

You asked her, “Do people understand you?”

And she told you that because she had you, that’s all she needed. You picked up on the fact that, at that moment, she did not name your stepdad. You next asked her if she also has a dream, something she loves that people don’t ‘get’, apparently nobody but you. She told it to you then, but it hurt you to remember exactly what it was and that she had to learn to be content with just supporting you in your dreams instead. You reminded her of that ‘twinkle twinkle’ lullaby she used to sing you and tell you that you were the most special little boy because you came from a star.

“I think I was born under a bad star, mom.”

“If you are, we’re from the same one-”

You smiled and snuggled deeper into her perfumed scrubs.

“-and I’ll never leave you.”

The night of her funeral, you went to sleep with no one to wipe away your tears and kiss your forehead the way she used to. Your stepfather was not the affectionate type and your place in his life was much more fragile. From that night on, you never stopped wishing that you could go with her. You wouldn’t say this to anyone, but you didn’t want to live anymore. You kept on because you knew she would’ve wanted you to. And you were just a kid, so everyone kept telling you that things would get better as you got older.

Things never did. And that was the first time you went to space.

It was a slippery slope. Every time you experienced the detrimental waves of isolation and yearning that you tried your hardest to suppress, you went to space. You wanted to go back to the star you were born from and curse it for subjecting you to such a miserable earthly life. You didn’t want to feel this loss anymore. You just wanted it all to stop.

Space felt good. It was better than being conscious and you wanted to stay there. It was a kind of out-of-body ascension that turned into something beautiful and unencumbered.

Eye to eye with the universe, with God. You whispered your name until she beckoned you within her. In the weightless bliss, you float, unburdened by the past lives you’ve walked. You no longer yearned for the comforting grace of being loved, you wanted the unlimited opportunities of the skies. You were foolish to think you were the only living thing out here when you could feel it all breathing. Everything is breathing, vibrating. You feel the energy, you feel the spirit, but you do not hear voices. You were falling into a tunnel of obscurity. Something about this eye makes it impossible to lie. It sees you. This vacuum that you believed you existed in is becoming incredibly crowded the more that you learn. You will never know it all. It sees everything you are. It feels what you feel.

You and it are one. You are God.

When you close your eyes, the unknown takes you in and wipes your brain clean, you’ve surrendered. There are no problems in space.

☆☾☆☾☆☾☆☾☆☾☆☾☆☾☆☾☆☾☆☾☆☾☆☾☆☾☆☾☆☾☆☾☆☾☆☾☆☾☆☾☆☾☆☾☆☾☆☾

The stranger never raises her voice. Everything she says comes in waves of whispers and warnings. She tells you stories. She asks you if you’ll really stay. You are almost to Alpha Centauri, and once you reach there you must stay. Your ship will disappear along with your body.

You are no longer a traveler, you will just be in aimless oblivion. You have realized that this is how the stranger got here. You don’t want this to happen to you; you did before, but not now.

You tell her that she taught you connection in a place where connectivity means nothing, and now desire it on Earth, where it’s real. She can’t go with you; she just wants you to stay.

“ I can’t,” your epiphany is climaxing, “I think…Earth is the star. Earth is the place I was born from and I have to learn to live there. Just like everyone else. I have to go back. I HAVE TO GO BACK.” You start panicking just as Alpha Centauri is in sight. You don’t want to die anymore.

The strangers’ vibrations sing their agony. You both can’t even see the beauty in front of you through this emotional crescendo. Back and forth, you bump into each other as you attempt to find a way to turn your ship around. This is your ship and you decide where it goes. In a scuffle, the stranger finally takes off her helmet, and you see her. You love her. You realize your capacity for love hasn’t completely left you like you once thought. She takes off your helmet too.

There is a beautiful atmosphere that surrounds you. You embrace each other in the body of God.

She releases you and tells you to close your eyes. When you open them, the cuff of your suit remains locked into the groove of the siding of the ship, she has trapped you; she forces back on your helmet before you can protest. Before you realize what she is doing, she releases the hatch which only vacuums out her untethered body.

The second her unprotected, gray-skinned body reaches the icy mystery between something and nothing that exists outside of the ship, she implodes.

It happens directly in front of the window and you witness it. The same window that you’ve watched the cosmos through together. You can still feel where she touched you, through the rubbery seal skin of her suit, where the stars in her fingertips adorned your body. The scene of her bulging eyes, loose bones, and swelling blood vessels that combusted in milliseconds is now etched into your brain. You are heartbroken that she could do this to you, to herself. Is this what you’ve been doing? To other people and to yourself? You still have feelings and problems in space; no matter how far you run, you’ll never outrun yourself. You no longer yearn to sit on the edge of the crescent moon or to drown in the sea of eternal impossibilities; you yearn for things that stay. If the sky were to suddenly open up, there would be no law. There would be no rule.

There would only be you, your memories, the choices you’ve made, and the people you’ve touched. This is all you have now. You shouldn’t have shut yourself out and sent yourself into space, because there might have been a person or two on Earth who could’ve helped you. And you haven’t even given anyone the opportunity because you were so scared of them leaving you.

Now that you’ve faced it, all that you feel is regret.

She died directly in front of Alpha Centauri. You are finally face to face with your fictional mother star that you haven’t stopped watching since you knew about the universe.

You feel empty. You will never be able to go back to Earth with its abundance of strangers.

Strangers you could come to love.

But the star in your chest won’t stop dying.

Welcome to complete isolation, you think.

This is what you wanted and it’s the worst thing you’ve ever asked for.

Dasia Brown is a Junior Creative Writing and Philosophy major at Georgia College.

The link has been copied!