Do you believe?

When I first got to my station

it was to swap out with someone who had been up here

for almost three years. 

I thought he looked pretty good for someone

who’d been alone for that entire time.

I’d been warned that so much time on your own can be

bad for your health,

but it didn’t seem like that was the case. 

I saw a person who’d maintained their fitness regimen,

had been eating as well as one could up here,

had been keeping up proper hygiene practices

and seemed like they’d followed all of the steps

they were told would help get them through

all that time alone.

When the shuttle dropped me off,

the only thing

I was asked by the person I was replacing

was if I still believed in god.

I half-laughed and asked why

and I was told

being in space changes the way a person sees the universe.

Maybe there isn’t a god who made everything

and if anyone down on the earth thought they were

special

maybe they’d never seen an asteroid shower up close

or watched a solar flare or floated through space dust;

or maybe the idea that a god,

any god,

if they could make life on one planet,

and they had created the entire universe,

why would they have just stopped at one planet?

I didn’t have an answer for that one,

because I was still trying to get my head around the question:

do I still believe in god?

I don’t know.

It made me wonder if I ever had.

It made me wonder what I even thought about the whole thing.

I understand how one could try and find solace

in a cold world,

believing in being special and chosen,

unique amongst the earth and the firmament,

but the line of thinking loses steam

once one leaves earth for the time time.

Maybe that’s what my forebearer was trying to tell me:

no matter what I think I know, I never know a thing.

Whatever god I believe in, something will change it.

No matter how I understand the world to be,

it is almost always another way; 

no matter how I want the world to be,

it will almost always be another way.

No matter how I think being alone in space for three years will be,

it won’t be that way.

It will always be another way,

and there will always be something that will

force us out of our doldrums.

Do I still believe in god?

Thirty-five months later up here in space,

I’m getting ready to ask the next person the same question:

do you still believe in god?