Harbinger
In his more sentimental moments my father was fond of saying: “If happiness shows up make sure you give it a comfortable chair.” To my surprise I am strangely happy aboard Galileo, in spite of the cold and the damp — the temperature always seems to be several degrees below the readings shown on our instruments, like a home heated by an old boiler that isn’t quite up to the job. Surface condensation is everywhere, as though Galileo is being thawed from the grip of some arctic berg.
Why do I feel closer to you out here than I ever did on Earth? It’s your face I see when I look out at the stars, those tiny demarcations of light reconfiguring into a familiar constellation, one that holds my attention for hours on end.
You were the only one who ever got away with calling me “Mikey.” I would never allow anyone else to do it. It was a little boy’s name, something I’d left behind in childhood. “Mikey,” your face rising from my chest and looking up at my own. “Am I the best you’ve ever had?” I wonder that you had to ask in view of all that we’d just done together.
“You know you are.” Your mischievous grin telling me you already knew the truth, the tip of your tongue teasing me through those lips I could never bear to be parted from. Your starscape eyes just like the view I see now from space. Clear and limitless. In your eyes I glimpsed things I’d never seen before. Or since. Glitters and trails of light as if comets were contained within those orbits, harbingers of journeys yet to come. I can only hope such wonders were visible in my own gaze, though I doubt they were.
If only you could be with me now to share a similar spectacle: the view from the high platform of Galileo’s observation ports. I can see all the way to the nearest visible stars, countless millions of kilometres away, a view that would surely have a profound effect on even the dullest, most self-centred mind.
If you are a ghost, then may you haunt me to the end of time.
See also: https://www.facebook.com/thescreamingplanet