Whatcha Doin'?

Our pond was frozen over, its surface like an antique silvered mirror, clear with a bit of warp, as I looked down into it from the dock. It had been years since I had been here, back home, back on this farm. But here I was. And you weren’t.

It was easy to remember those days, all those years ago, when we first met. My family owned the farm then, and to bring in a little extra money we opened it up to the public during the summers for apple and berry picking. We even had petting zoo, taking the tamest of the livestock and bringing them into a large open pen that also had some benches that a local craftsman had traded to us for some of our harvest, a wooden stall where one of my older siblings would sell fresh fruits and lemonade, and that little pond with its sagging dock that even then was ancient and more than a little unstable.

I had been sitting on that dock, bare feet swinging and barely skimming the surface of the water, no more than eight years old, fishing with my prized fishing pole that was no more than a twig and some twine wrapped around it with a bent nail for a hook. No one in my family had bothered to tell me that there were no fish in the pond, and I don’t think it would have mattered. Chores done, every day, that is where I would be.

“Whatcha doin’” your soft voice chimed behind me, and I, so lost in my own forgotten childhood fantasies, jumped. That swift movement, and the weight of two young boys, caused the dock to buckle, throwing us into the pond. Your parents, always hovering, quickly pulled us out of the water that, had we simply sat up, would have barely topped our waists, and we, laughing the whole time, shared something that forged a bond that would never break. Until it did.

I found out that you lived just down the road, though back then in the country that meant a few miles that to a child seemed like continents away. But we ended up in the same school, in the same class, and became fast friends. Those early days as school friends evolved into a deeper friendship as we got older and were given more leash from our parents, with you often sitting down to dinner with my family and me spending nights sleeping on a foam rollout in your room.

Discovering that there was more to our relationship as we entered our teens was not as bad as it could have been. Your parents had always seemed to be aware that you were as you are, and a lot of their early hovering seemed aimed at protecting you from a world that, while getting better, was still not accepting of people different from the norm. And mine, while not happy at first, evolved with the times and, I like to think, the influence of your parents, who had become close family friends as well.

When we both came out and professed that we loved each other in our late teens, only after you had prodded me for months to take heart and believe in the goodness of our families, we were met with love, and caring, and even then, warning that, though we already knew, life would not be easy for us. I don’t think they even imagined how hard it would be.

We excelled in school academically, and physically, and went on to college in larger cities where people were more accepting and we eased into a pleasant, almost idyllic life. You branched off into physics and I pursued biology. You moved deeper into astrophysics and quantum studies. I buckled down into chemistry and medicine. And then we came to what would separate us.

You wanted to study the stars. I wanted to go there.

At first this wasn’t that big of a deal. I started doing everything I could to make myself attractive to NASA. Physical conditioning, continued study in computing and engineering, anything that would be useful to an astronaut. You deepened your studies in practical and theoretical science, tackling things that would advance us to where we are now, looking at cold fusion, relativity, and anything that would help humanity move out into the stars.

We spent some time apart eventually as you got to play around with the other scientists at the large hadron collider and I was granted a tour on the International Space Station. And we weathered these separations fairly well. It was hard, to be sure, but our love for each other was strong enough to keep us together, though we never, and I regret this now, got married, though by the time we were both into our professional careers this was no longer a societal issue.

But then you did it. You discovered the secret to relativistic flight. You created the theory that allowed humanity to reach the stars. And I helped build the drive. You’ll be happy to know that they still call it the Calvin Drive. It always makes me smile to hear it. But in the end it was my fault that we were finally separated. I signed up to test the drive. And after years with NASA and being a part of the team to design it, I was the easy choice.

I remember being on comms with Houston as I powered up the drive. I learned when I got back that from mission control’s perspective it seemed like the small ship I was on had simply atomized. There was no debris, no trail, no telemetry for where I might have gone. I was simply there, and then I wasn’t. No one expected the drive to fail the way it did.

But it didn't fail. I had travelled, but not to where we had assumed I would. NASA, you, the world, were looking for me around Mars. Based on the few points of reference I could find and plug into the computers I was about a hundred light years beyond. Thankfully I was able to plot a reverse course relatively quickly. After determining the appropriate power level for the drive based on that first flight I was able to return. In my panic, while I was figuring out where I was and how to program a return course, I didn’t even think about the distance, and the larger problem, relativity.

Over a hundred years had passed by the time I reappeared in orbit around Earth. I was contacted by the International Space Agency very quickly, and after a short period of confusion and disbelief, I was picked up by a cruiser. I spent weeks on that cruiser in debriefing and interviews, but it mostly passed in a blur after they told me that you had passed some years ago. After that nothing really mattered.

And now, standing on a dock that someone had rebuilt looking down into our pond I could feel the tears freezing on my face as I thought of you and the last thing you said to me as Houston patched you through before I activated the drive that I had built based on your revelation, and I whispered it into the frigid air.

“Whatcha doin’?”