Moonbase
My first night
alone
on the moon was a long one.
A cold one.
Maybe the longest and coldest night I’ve ever known.
Whenever I reported back to
homebase,
someone would ask if the dark had
gotten to me yet
and I always replied, no.
The darkness wasn’t what
felt
most isolating.
It was the cold,
the loneliness.
The difficulty in getting through
that first night,
the longest night,
and the long nights that came afterwards
lay in knowing the length of time
never changed.
The only thing that changed was
how I counted
time,
how I measured
all the moments
while watching our pale blue dot
from my little station,
watching the monitors for signs
of invasion,
doing it all by myself for a year.
When I signed up for the job
I thought,
what’s a year to me?
A year is just a year.
It isn’t even that long.
I survived three years of plague.
I can survive a year alone on the moon.
I can survive a year of weight on my back,
a year waiting for what we are watching to signal
they are watching back.
I can survive a year of knowing my message
will arrive too late,
no matter how early I send it.
I can survive a year
of feigning hope,
of whispering sweet nothings—
all is well, no news, everything is in order—
so someone can tell someone else
everything
is under control.
I don’t think that first night alone
I really understood
what time on the moon would be like.
I didn’t understand
how a moment
can be a moment
can be a moment
can be a moment,
but a moment isn’t always a moment
and sometimes a single moment
has the same mass as a lifetime of moments.
Sitting alone that first night on the moon
with nothing
but silence and my own arms to keep me company,
I sat through one long moment.
Maybe I thought the plague years would have helped me with time,
with knowing things happen for as long as they happen,
and that nothing is forever.
Not even forever is forever.
But on the coldest and longest night of my life
I forgot what I knew,
and for the rest of the year I remembered what I forgot
and the weight of remembering the forgotten is
heavier
than anything else
I can think of.
