What Space Will Do To You

Samantha kept dropping her food. Gravity was one of the many things she was no longer used to and it pained her to see such a beautiful taco splayed at her feet, the lettuce scattering like confetti and the chili dripping into her hardwood floor. Samantha had been excited to return to Earth, to the familiar coziness of her kitchenette. But as she sat on her counter, tomato juice sinking through her jeans, the smallness of her home seemed to suffocate rather than comfort her. From the silver pans hanging from the ceiling rack to the drops of cheese that were beginning to harden on the stove, Samantha couldn’t help but feel the insignificance and artificialness of such things. How could she when she’d seen the planet Earth in all its entirety? That globe outside her station window which seemed to shrink a little bit more when she shut her right eye. And as the ship continued speeding, Samantha would float there, just like the planet she saw before her. Even when it became the size of a marble, the vibrant blues and greens of billions never diminished. It was her North Star that guided her in the dangerous ocean of space. Samantha swam and did flips above her bed and caught jellybeans in her mouth like Pacman. Even though her space cabin squeezed her in a bearhug, it reminded her of home.

Now, as Samantha hopped off the counter, she felt the weight of every bone in her body as her bare feet made contact with the cool ground. There was a stillness to her kitchen she had never noticed before, a stagnant resistance she remembered quite differently. She was an ant transformed into a bird. The burrow beneath the dirt that once shielded her like a blanket was no place for a creature with wings who had touched the sky. But there was no way to dig out. Her once-in-a-lifetime mission was complete and there would be no extra wish from a golden lamp. She was just another dab of color blended and washed until disappeared in the green blues of her memory.

Angrily, Samantha scooped her homemade taco into her palms like a kid forming a collapsing snowball, getting red and brown oil everywhere. She could have used a towel, but she missed getting her hands dirty. She was aching to feel something real, like the coarse orange sand that made up Mars’ surface. The powder shards of an isolated world that’d never felt the touch of Life before she had made a difference. Samantha had raked her fingers through the uneven rocks, getting pebbles stuck between her nails. The sealed dome that rose above her head casted a cool darkness that made the colorful dirt feel like a frigid breath. Their colony resembled that of a pop-up health clinic as researchers sat in their plastic chairs at several desks, analyzing stones beneath microscopes. It was a lonely planet, but the sounds of twisting dials, a distant beeping, and a creaking table leg added to the atmosphere of calm that surrounded Samantha as she laid down on Mars. She didn’t care about the sand flaking her hair like dandruff, similar to how she didn’t care about the pieces of ground beef slipping between her fingertips as she carried the remains of her taco over to the nearest trash can.

Samantha cleaned her hands, the water flowing down in streams rather than floating before her as a single bubble attached to a fragile core she could gulp down in one bite. It was always a game in space, a challenge to survive. She was forced to live without the faucet, the paper towels, the kitchen, and all the other frivolous materials that existed on Earth. And now that she was back, it was almost like she had forgotten how to use any of them. She was a time traveler accustomed to the ways of cavemen in a new world… but with rovers and buggies. She was a hunter-gatherer, leaving the colony to collect minerals like a hermit crab, and coming home before the sun set and the sky matched the red ground. She had a purpose, unlike the present, which mainly consisted of hiding from the paparazzi who expected her to return to her “normal life.” However, Samantha was part of the first team of astronauts to live on Mars and she longed to be the second and the third and so on. Or perhaps the first to plant a tree on Mars, the first to do a handstand on Mars, the first to make coffee on Mars… She knew how lucky she was to even be put in a history book or the front page of a newspaper, but as she folded another tortilla, she couldn’t help but think that she had returned to being something like the trillionth person to make a taco on Earth. This planet seemed to swallow her like a tiny krill compared to Mars where she was the giant who had touched the sun. Samantha had liked Earth much more when it was the only home she had known. She didn’t want to be considered a star among her peers, but a real one amongst the galaxy that lay beyond her kitchen window. She looked out, but the pollution had blocked out the night sky.