meforyou

Nobody can hear a scream in the vacuum of space, or so they say.

Nobody can see a dream in the absence of grace, that’s why we pray.

And nobody, and I mean nobody, can feel your own heart beat,

In the moment you take to say,

“I love you, I love you”

To a person you've saved.

Least that’s what my mom used to say when she was still around.

It was her favorite poem, and now it’s mine. I can’t remember who authored it, but it might as well have been her. Like Adele’s version of “Make You Feel My Love”, she popularized it for me. And for the way the words would roll off her tongue, eager to be clipped by the soft filter of her lips, I never wanted to hear those words leave anybody else’s mouth. That way, her memory would stay preserved in the bright recesses of my mind, even when most of it felt so dark. To me, those words captured the best of her, and somehow naming them anyone else’s would betray her memory. My memory.

That poem was hers, and now it’s mine.

I think that’s how art works in general. “Make You Feel My Love” was never Dylan’s to begin with. The melodies were sent by heaven, the words formed through his experiences on this earth, and the instrumentation was a perfect amalgamation of the legends that came before him. Guthrie, Odetta…even Chuck Berry, to name a few. And their art wouldn’t have been the same if it weren’t for the legends that came before them. Nat King Cole, Marian Anderson, and so on and so forth. We could literally go on forever…right up to the big bang, that is.

But all that to say, if you can’t really say that a song, or any piece of art for that matter, really, truly belongs to any one person…you might as well make it your own. So that’s what I’m doing. And I’m pretty sure all 50 of us aboard this goddamn ship are doing it too.

It’s like since we’ve left for Mars, in spite of a planet that we destroyed without so much as a thank you for giving us life, at least as we once knew it; we’ve formed this collective memory around the people we lost through the art that they loved. And it just happened really, as we were hurtling through the final layers of Earth’s atmosphere. Which was, by the way, riddled with satellite debris. I swear, we couldn’t even keep the sky from feeling the depths of our pain.

But it’s not like the death of our planet came as a surprise to anyone. We all knew that the environment would be too toxic to support life on earth much longer, and that we would have to find ways to survive the ones we were forced to leave behind. And that goes for the people who “decided” to stay back, too. Not for hope that they might survive, but in faith that their children would. I mean, no one over the age of 65 was even considered to make the grueling trip over. It’s only been 150 fucking years since the inception of Mission Mars, you'd have thought that they’d have figured out a way to make the trip a little more hospitable for our elderly by now. But alas, here we are. Maybe they could’ve and didn’t care to, because our parents didn’t fit into their vision of a “new and self-sustaining colony”. Or maybe, just maybe, we were never meant to live our lives past the safe bounds of our planet. A planet that gave us life, but only if we could share it with the rest of its creation. And we never could. I mean look at us, we can barely share within ourselves.

And in that way, the pain of our past follows us into the promise of our future. A future constructed by the very hands that created the hellscape we were forced to leave behind. I don’t trust them to not repeat the same mistakes again. Not even a little bit. Not after seeing my mom for the last time…her face crying, just trying so hard to keep it all together with a smile that would betray her true emotion in our final moments together. You don’t make mistakes like that. You condone them. I mean, all the fucking warnings...someone planned that moment. Someone decided to put her in that position, to put us into that situation…and for that, I can’t help but feel a certain hopelessness when I consider the prospect of life past survival on Mars.

How do a peoples that have only ever known survival, create life on a planet, once considered uninhabitable, without the very people who were showing them what life was all about?

I’m not sure.

But I promise you, that as long as I'm alive,

As long as I take breath.

I am going to do everything in my power to get us as close as possible.

for I am You, and You are Me

And if I’m ever lucky enough to have children of my own, these are the words that I hope they choose to make their own. Because if we don’t know that by the time they roll around…we don’t stand a chance.