Staying grounded

The delicate chain had presumably spooled into a serpentine form in the moments after the incident. One could only guess at the violence that had caused its derailment from the intended journey towards home, clinging gently to the neck of some now nobody. Frozen golden river, drifting towards the next identical moment.

Its former owner’s family line had continued for a spell but had extinguished about a century ago. The place where they extinguished was no longer home. Nor was the vessel that departed that home. Her daughter forgot her name and eventually her face as the whisps of time began to pull away at everything except for the immediate moment. And the memory of the memory faded too.

She hadn’t left for any clear reason. The moon pulled her up and she kept going. The stakes were an abstraction when she left. But as she fell into herself, the darkness eneveloped her and the pride and glory she felt when she left vanished into abject horror. The isolation. The locket floating around her neck both her greatest shame and the only thing tethering her to anything. Grounded, reluctantly by the thin warm metal around her neck, and the addicting throbs of grief in her heart.

She steered the vessel towards the rock and matched its speed before approaching. The vessel gently rooted itself in the composite slag, only microgravity keeping the composite together. She sucked on the locket while she worked. Eyes fixed on the display and the port. Less glorious than the recruiter had implied.

Her daughter had given the heart shaped locket to her the month before she’d left. She’d picked it out and written a card on a scrap of paper, and presented it on the beach. Don’t forget about us mommy. I’ll always love you. These memories were too much to bear left her screaming, floating in the sleeping capsule, writhing and kicking like a newborn, tearing at the locket around her neck like an umbilical cord. She would give in to these tantrums until drifting off, bleeding into a hollowed exhaustion.

It was six years of this, only 40% of the way through the belt that it was enough. She parked her ship at a site and after drifting a safe distance from the vessel vaporized herself with a liter of fuel.

The old woman sat in her usual spot in the care center, though she didn’t know it. Her universe had been reduced to arm’s reach in the past few months and the caretakers had downgraded her care level because she was projected to outlive her meager budget. Her children didn’t visit any more than they were expected to and she was untethering herself from this world.

Whisps of images passed through her mind too quickly for her glazed to observe. A beach, stern face, necklace in a hand, a ship taking off, a skinned knee, an octopus, another face, a big open orange room, another warm face, skin and warmth, glowing in her stomach, gray rooms, a red sky. A man she half recognized. Trees growing out of the middle of the road, caught in the sun. A bear in a hotel lobby. Then uniforms.

Then this room and the empty checkerboard in front of her. She tried to remember the first thing again but the hands on the table in front of here were so revoltingly gnarled she couldn’t see anything else. Her eyes followed the delicate vein up her arm as her mind loosened and relaxed from her body. Her eyes closed and the blue turned gold and when she opened them she was gone.