To leave Earth and all known things behind — I was never huge on certainty but I am afraid of death and all irrevocable changes. Out there where there is no noise of human civilization, where the honking of horns and the slapping of cash registers at the convenience store on a Monday morning just wouldn’t exist. Out there where masses of people are not starving — perhaps there is a different, more subtle form of starvation, in the rocks and in the invisible creatures of the air. I would walk around with terrible peripheral vision and a constant hunger for the smell of food sautéing in a pan. The feel of the atmosphere on my fingers. The sun beating its way down past the reservoir in a lonely park. All of the things that are not worth living for until you are forced to leave, empty-handed and with a great yearning for justice and quiet and aloneness, with only vague memories of the history of your kind burnished deep under your space helmet.
mabel lee 