794. I'd like to believe . . .

I stood and watched from the bridge as Hyneria slipped away. Her dim light filling the observation deck as it filled our eyes. All were there, all leaden of foot and hunched of shoulder. There was shallow breathing and the quiet hum of Bravo. And one couldn’t help but think our coffin metal, these shiny walls of quarry and glass. To know the inside of one’s tomb, not with age and of purchase, but young, of within not as visit but swallowed whole, consumed alive by the infinite black soil of the universe. This is how I met the crew. Survivors bound by loss and weighed with grief.

My name is Kyra. I have passage because my grandfather was somebody, because he believed that I was too. These twin sacks I carry and the air I breathe is humid in memory of lesson and loss, of the dock and who was there and who was not. Of my family, I am the only survivor. I witnessed my sister die young in the arms of our benediction and ablution. The others, I can only pray imagination takes leave of me, of this sense of not knowing the last, not seeing the hand of peace close their eyes, a torment that knows no drowning. But I will say this, my parents died to me long before Hyneria consumed itself. I struggle to purge myself of the bitterness, the rejection they knowingly or not bestowed. And although it is not packed among our supplies, I can feel it as I feel the very leather upon my skin.

I suppose, as most, I am guided in this way, by what has occurred to me and of what is expected. I want to give what I did not have. I want a child. I want to know of warm blankets and of books read at night. But mostly, I want the tender kisses goodnight, of love exchanged in the first person, by choice, by presence. I want to look and be seen in the way of mother and child and I want to know of this giving of life beyond the giving of life. In a way, the child in me wants to be the parent. To know that in this interminable darkness, there is a light and to cup my hands around it, to protect it, to reflect in it. I would like to believe this is possible. I’d like to believe this is something.