Mission Agape

*Recovered From Mission Agape: Wreckage Found 2089*

Do you know what it looks like in space? In deep space, I mean. Maybe you have seen movies and you are thinking supernovas. Maybe you imagine black holes surrounded by doomed stars being sucked into nothingness and nonexistence. You are getting closer with the latter.

There is no light in deep space. There is nothing to reflect light in deep space. So, except for me there is nothing but emptiness here in deep space. Even that feels up for debate. After so long in darkness and isolation I do not feel sure that even I exist anymore. Surely there is a consciousness here that I am grappling with, my own voice in my head fighting with my own thoughts incessantly with no reprieve. Which is maybe why I am saying this out loud and recording my own voice for no one, because it is a small break from the minutia that is bouncing around in my head like the DVD symbol on a black screen when you have left the TV on too long.

I think there is a point to this… Oh, yes. I am finished. I cannot do this any longer, so this is my final message, my goodbye. I think, I hope. There is some oxygen left in a hibernation pod. Surely not enough to go on forever, thank God. I will sleep for some time, and then this nightmare will be over. When I rest, the ghosts that haunt me will rest too. This is a good thing.

Perhaps it seems strange that I am recording this message at all, of course, it is for no one. This is my last-ditch effort to make these 50 years I have been spinning through space mean something. An attempt to prove to myself that I still have choices. I have been so long in darkness and without hope that I have started to imagine a green glowing light in the distance out of my tiny window. But there is nothing. There is no light in deep space.

It is perhaps the most outrageous thing you could find on an exploratory expedition to space, the knowledge that whatever was worth knowing in this world, you left on Earth. I left to recover known elements on another planet that would forever improve the health and quality of life of everyone on Earth. What I recovered instead is the knowledge and deep understanding that when I took that mission, I left behind everything that ever truly mattered. In the end I traded everything real for the vast emptiness of space. I had a family, I had children, a husband, parents, sisters. Mine to borrow, to love and enjoy, not to keep. I know that now. They were never mine to have and I took that for granted. I did not let them fill me up every day. Instead, I fed an emptiness that told me there was more out there. I filled that void with science and medicine and “sacrifice for the greater good”. And now that emptiness is mirrored back to me in infinity. It seeps in through the non-existent cracks in this metal prison, literally engulfing my spiraling tin can from every direction. It was supposed to be two years. Two years of missing middle school plays and soccer games. Two years of fascinating science and discovery, two years of missing my family.

I do not know what happened. When I first woke up there were lights and beeps and food inside, complete darkness outside. I should have been on a planetary outpost when I woke up. That was 6 months ago, and nearly forty-nine years after I should have woken up. For six months I have tried to find a way back, I have tried to find an explanation and I have tried fix this, and I cannot. This ship was fitted with 2 hibernation pods, the one I was in opened when the oxygen was depleted, and the ship activated. These ships are designed with maximum precautions and safeguards, within reason and accounting for capacity. I suppose in that regard I should count myself lucky? Soon the ship will tap into the oxygen from the second hibernation unit. By my calculations I only have a few days left of full ship access. Being that the lights went out almost 2 weeks ago that is not saying much anyway. My choice has been made. I cannot make my way home. I can freeze, or starve, or suffocate… or I can sleep. I choose sleep.

As a final message all I can really say is that I had a mission, I felt it calling and, at the time, it felt true. It felt like the biggest act of love, graciously bestowed by me to millions, billions, of unknowing strangers whose lives I would change for the better. They would love me, and they wouldn’t even know it but that didn’t matter because this was my act of love to lay upon their heads. My family would forgive me two years, we would make up for lost time and it would all be worth it.

In the end, I traded everything, everything… sunsets, mountains, seas, even somehow stars! I traded the laughs of my babies, love, sex, color, smiles. Everything. I traded it for an infinity of nothing. Twinkling lights of nothing, ever expanding, infinitely multiplying… nothing. I know a different thing about love now. It is inside me, it has many forms and serves many purposes, but it needs to be shared and reciprocated. And it is an enormously better and more desirable mirror than darkness.

*End Recording*