Page 78 of To the Moon and Back

STEPH FLIGHT

For a very long time, no one went to the moon. It was tired, done, no longer valued in the aftermath of the Cold War. We made no plans to return. And then, finally, we did.

People saw it as a step toward what was next, toward farther travel, toward an eventual mission to Mars.

Everything is only a step. Science and exploration happen slowly, carefully.

Like three thousand years of Polynesian wayfinders, mapping sea by stars.

It’s hard sometimes, on the voyage to the next island, to realize when you’re there. Or that you’re somewhere.

Before they sent me to the moon, I went three times to the International Space Station.

Up there the days are full of research, logging incremental changes on charts and tables. Jogging while strapped to a treadmill, washing my hair live for NASA’s children’s programming, looking down at the Earth below. I cannot possibly make sense of life, of this life, not as I still live it.

Sometimes I float alone in the quiet dark and feel the rush of a thousand moments as they fly through my memory.

In bright flashes I see myself wishing on a potato chip that came folded over itself and reading a book with a flashlight; I feel the particular itch of the grass under my neck, on nights I lay under stars.

Sometimes I think about the years I lived in my father’s house, and the years I lived in my mother’s house, and then this—what this is now—and all the years I can’t yet imagine.

Sometimes it overwhelms me, like I’ve lived a life so full and varied that little drops of it splash out over the rim.

I can’t catch them in my hands. On Earth I hear the soft, low laugh of my wife sprawled out on a couch beside me—a sound that is easy, that is good—and I could cry at how lucky I am to hear it.

In space I lie perfectly still, my legs in the air stretched out behind me; I watch those same stars I watched as a child.

On my first night in space, years ago, the others slept. I stayed awake and looked out from the cupola.

When I was a girl, I read the memoirs of astronauts.

They said the view had made them feel like the only person in the universe.

Michael Collins, the only Apollo 11 astronaut to not touch the lunar surface, wrote about circling above his two crewmates while they walked on the moon.

For twenty-two hours he piloted the command and service module, talked to mission control, and waited.

Someone had to stay on the ship, and Collins was the only one who could get them safely home.

Later, he said his time with NASA was the shiniest, best chapter in his life, but not the only one.

He said the thing he remembered most was the view of Earth.

“Tiny… Blue and white. Bright. Beautiful. Serene and fragile.”

I already knew to look down, to fully see where I had come from.

My crewmates and I were alone up there. Just the beeping, and the whirring, and the uneasy protection of thick walls.

Our own slow breaths, mission control on a screen, the four of us on the space station I had watched pass over my head.

All those years I had looked for it, had waited for it, in my most lonely hours.

At one point, I could now admit, the slow streak of white station over night sky had been like the wave of a hand over a forehead, like Last Rites.

But here, in this near-total isolation, I only felt a chorus of souls echoing up from the Earth and the station, and someday the moon, and from places we hadn’t yet been to or found. From the galley beneath me I heard the creaking of the ship, the humming, the sigh of bodies turning over in sleep.

We circled the Earth every ninety minutes. But only once, if I was attentive and careful, would I find what I was looking for. I stayed awake. I waited.

Below, just over the Ozarks, the minutes before dawn.

It was still dark, the land dotted with the yellow and white of lit streets and houses.

Looking out on our home world, I knew that even as I hovered here soft in my aloneness, there were people sleeping and waking up, closing books and buttoning shirts, millions of hands moving in the dailiness of life.

I checked my watch and tracked our coordinates.

There.

Two hundred fifty miles below me, in the light of a house, one of a hundred thousand lights—my mother had lived.

I knew Kayla stood at the kitchen window. She held her palm, still and warm, against a pane of glass. In the house our mother had brought us to, in a town in the foothills of mountains—where eclipse means a story, means a frog eating the moon.

My sister had promised to leave the light on.