Sometimes I glance out the window and try to see where the universe ends. It takes over my view, and all I see is stars, and all I feel is my mind reaching and grasping, my neurons failing to compartmentalize this image in a way I can understand, failing to comprehend the neverendingness of it all. I get so enveloped in the incomprehensible beauty of it that I become deprived of all my material possession, my tangibility, and I become nothing more than a few atoms in space. I become inconsequential and infinitesimal. I lose my gravity and the hairs on my head rise and my spine arches, yet what I notice the most is the burning of my eyes when I don’t blink for hours. I lose any understanding of north, south, east, or west; There’s no center anymore- just everything.
I don’t even remember the last time I heard my voice. It’s so quiet that I wake up believing I’ve gone deaf. Everything is slower, softer, and the silence is sonorous. Sometimes, I go to the grid and let myself float in what could no longer be described as air, just the accumulation of oxygen and carbon from the tanks. I go there and let my eyes close and my thoughts run. When I do this, it throws me back into my memories on Earth, like grabbing the ladder in the pool while I hold my breath, taking in the calm and the deadliness of water. It feels like sinking, like landing on your bed after a long flight, like listening to the rain pat the windows. It feels like the breeze grazing your cheek while you watch the sunset, like driving alone with no destination. It feels like peace. It’s floating, in every sense of the word.
I remember why I chose to go up here. I wanted to see it, for real. To feel it. To look down at Earth and think about how small it truly is, how 8 billion people live on a circular rock in the middle of nowhere, how I might look down at my old home whose windows must be rusting and wonder if someone was looking up at me, if we were looking at each other in a way no one else had ever done.
When I got here, it was like all my problems faded away, like they didn’t matter in the grand scheme of things, when, in a few years, I’d barely remember them. But what really got me was the impossibility of my existence. The idea that a few rocks and the right chemicals and temperature created everything. The idea that we were just a few bacteria in the ocean and we are now touching the skies. The probability that I am even alive feels like a breach of physics, like there’s simply no way that a single crack in the glass will depressurize the cabin and send me flying. There’s no way that I have a favorite color, that I can feel love, that I am breathing in and out, that my heart is pumping blood through my body. There’s no way that if I focus enough, I can feel it moving in my veins. There’s simply no way that I think things are pretty, and that I think others are ugly. There’s no way that my mother’s time was cut short, and my father’s ran for too long. But it is. It’s here.
I don’t think I’ll ever get used to it. The way the sunrise looks from this point, moving above the Earth and striking a line of light into the vacuum of stars. The way I’m all alone, slowly dissolving into the universe’s matter until someone discovers me decades from now. The way I’m in a constant state of awe, as if I’m watching all this in third person, as if humans were ever supposed to be here, as if describing this in my head would help me understand. It’s just so perfect. It’s just so beautiful.
