After the Last Signal

The message arrives

after he has already stopped waiting for it.

A small green light

blinks inside the helmet,

patient as a star

that died before anyone named it.

He hears his daughter laughing first,

though that was years ago,

before the launch,

before the photographs,

before she learned to wave

without believing he would come back.

There is no sound in space.

He knows this.

Still, he listens.

Later,

his suit will drift past a moon

no one has mapped properly.

Ice will gather

in the folds of his gloves.

His name will become

a line in an old report,

then a question,

then nothing anyone remembers

without searching.

But now

his heartbeat fills the helmet

like someone knocking

from the wrong side of a door.

Earth is behind him,

or beneath him,

or already gone.

He cannot tell anymore.

The last thing he said

was not important.

Something about oxygen.

Something about the view.

Something ordinary,

because humans are always wasting

their final words

on practical matters.

Before the silence,

there was rain

against a kitchen window.

Before the rain,

a cup left cooling.

Before the cup,

her hand on his sleeve

as if touch could argue

with distance.

And after all of this,

before all of this,

light keeps travelling.

It crosses the dark

with no grief in it.

It passes the comet’s bright wound,

the dead suns,

the slow-turning galaxies

holding their fire inside themselves.

No echo follows.

No voice returns.

Only the small machinery

of his breathing,

then less of that,

then less.

Somewhere,

a child dreams

her father is still moving

through the stars.

Somewhere,

he is.