Lost in Space

A frontier too big and too far away

Photo by Krzysztof Niewolny on Unsplash

“How was Space City?” (Cité de l’éspace — but now we are only summering here and live so far away French is fast becoming an alien tongue). Space itself is not so distant — about one hundred kilometres in a straight line up, it’s just hard to get to, a much more difficult journey than Croatia to France by car or a two hours and twenty minutes flight.

“Great! BEST DAY EVER!” A bright enthusiastic smile, as she zips off to do something, anything, other than talking to me.

Curious I think, that there are so few stories from such a great day. That she takes her thoughts with her in speedy turns, buries them in a nest beside the sofa, scrunches them with her latest artworks in the drawer, screws them into TV images with her eyes. No tales, no chatter, appearing at a tangent from outer space, just very busy busyness.

Only when it’s dark and still and “Time for bed!” does the truth shuffle out. Like her thoughts have slowed down with the dimming of the light, and my closing the curtain drawn a safe space for secrets. That tricky truth: it is squeezed through tears, shuddering on trembles, gets caught in the hooked and hooded look in her frightened eyes.

She is huddling to me on the bed, her toy space shuttle (that makes noises and comes with its own astronaut) on the shelf beside her. Then the words come. As if the hatch has opened in the still of space, and a lone figure floated out vulnerable on a plastic string.

“I don’t want to be an astronaut.” It comes out in a wobbled up howl, with the gravitational power to pull in an immediate cuddle from me. Her voice quivers out on the bulbous surface of a tear-laden sob. I try to become the infinite cosmos to enfold every frightened part of her as I catch my laugh but release my astonishment.

All the time I’m searching deep for the unheard sounds beneath her words. I think I know what she’s really scared of, but then again it may be lost in translation from below to above. It’s all a matter of tuning in, but that is often easier said than done. There is sound in space, infra-sound, it’s just that we cannot hear it without special equipment and lateral thinking. Like the x-ray space telescope observing the gas clouds where the hum of Perseus’s blackhole’s song ends — 250 million light years away. If we could listen to the universe maybe we would hear planets groan and asteroids lament. The black hole in Perseus is singing in B-flat.

“But you don’t have to be.” I push her hair from the tears on her face in a caress. I show admirable motherly tenderness — a galaxy swirling gently around my tiny star — even though I know it’s the other way around. Dark flow, black holes, the dangers of the universe beckon.

Scattered on the wall and ceiling her pink luminous stars can barely be seen against the paint. Does she think because her uncle bought her a rocket ship one Christmas we have decided it all for her?

A real astronaut could tell you that you can’t cry in space, the tears won’t flow without gravity, but they probably wouldn’t tell you how they found that out.

“I don’t know what I want to be.” Her eyes frightened at the huge unknowable vastness of times ahead.

She is six years old.

“You have plenty of time to decide.” I fix my eyes on her like a tractor beam trying to pull her back to safety. Her eyes are lost in the enormity of the unknown, as I stroke her hair to bring her back to earth, to me.

“But if I don’t pick there’ll only be astronaut jobs left — everyone else will have taken the good ones.

“And space is frightening. There are giant comets and asteroids and meteors and you cannot breathe, and now the dinosaurs are all dead.”

She has learned about extinction events and black holes and the endlessness of everything. She has seen her vulnerability — a pinprick — much much smaller in scale than her rocket to her or even her smallest glittered plastic pink star.

A meteorite strikes the earth somewhere between five and ten times a year. Many more meteors flash in the sky as space debris hits our atmosphere, the meteoroids that survive fall, but most of them don’t make it here, never earn the name of meteorite.

So much to learn in her small universe, so much to teach her.

“Oh, Sweetie! It doesn’t quite work like that…”

But how do all the things work exactly? I wish every answer were as simple in the vastness of the unknown between parent and child.

The whole bigness of space and the smallness of her. She’s been struck like a comet hitting earth and wiping the future away. The expanse of that future, the one where we don’t get extinguished, the number of things to learn — we might as well be lost in a space shuttle with a million flashing buttons — not knowing which one to press for happiness, which direction to steer to find home. And she needs to feel her tether to somewhere called home, and because her home has changed that tether is tied to us. But we were so fickle as to move her far away from all she’s known — she’s not quite convinced we’re up to the job.

The moon is anchored in orbit with the earth, the earth to the sun, and so on, outward and onward, until we get too far. But the Virgo supercluster is not gravitationally bound, and the universe is too big and busy getting bigger to revolve around us. Even our fickle moon is getting further from the earth at a rate of nearly four centimetres per year, the shape of the earth is changing, bulging, its rotation getting slower. The moon is pulling away, slowly but surely, we fear for the tides and remember we can only ever see one side of the moon. Without the moon the earth would move much faster, and all of us struggling with life, work, kids, would have to fit it into a six-hour day.

Three summers later (approximately an 11.4 cm increase of the moon’s circular path) we are staying in a place I picked purely for the view, just to sit there and look at it. Gorski Kotar (mountain district — this other alien tongue has become familiar to her now). The hills of Croatia on one side (brda — I did mention the Croatian language came from outer space) those of Slovenia (hribi — and Slovenian from another planet again) on the other — and the sky, they share so much of it. The heavens of earth hanging there bright blue by day, unmarred by human lights by night. That sky, that textured sky, so full of possibilities some of which will hurl blazing through the dark in the Perseids meteor shower tonight.

She is better anchored now, my youngest, she can see more possibilities of who she’d like to be, of who she can be right now. She has narrowed her view to see only just beyond what she can cope with, as many wishes as she can see from her home under the stars. A teacher, a pop singer/songwriter, an inventor, a vet, a writer, a fashion designer, or maybe a bit of each. Right now, she wants to star watch with her parents, right now she wants to stay up late and see the meteors fall. Now she is brave, brave enough to pick one or two or three and make her — wishes without too much longing that they come true.

The “stars” fall, one like a medieval painting, a splash of heaven, a fiery daub of molten gold streaking through the sky. She grips my hand with the excitement of it. Sharing her moment not her wish, not her worries — for now the only worries about stars should be which one to wish upon tonight.

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Originally published in Lit Up on Medium. I was inspired to bring it over to Substack by Kathy Fish’s Fun with Facts prompt in the Flash Fiction Extravaganza she’s running in her most excellent Substack: The Art of Flash Fiction . I’ve been too short of time to take much of a part this time around, but when I saw today’s prompt I remembered how much fun I had writing this. I wish I readily remembered half the facts I burrowed out, it felt so natural at the time. The kid now has film school in her sights :)

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