This is one of the prompts I submitted for this week’s Odd Prompts challenge.
The stars look different from the vantage point of space, away from atmosphere and pollutants, microsatellites and fragments of debris cluttering the hopes of astronomers for decades.
They glow, the stars, in helix patterns and spirals, shining reds and purples and blues, glowing vortexes and streaks of golden stardust. Swirls of asteroid hurtle past, forming rings and eyes, glittering auras too numerous to form constellations.
I’m privileged to have seen this from above the azure oceans, greens and browns and blues and shining lights of the planet I used to call home. There aren’t many of us who have made it up here, with the robots coming to take the dangerous space jobs.
Until the colonization ships are done, most people won’t make it off Earth. Most people don’t even want to leave, tied to families and homes and jobs they don’t enjoy. And the ships we’re building won’t have windows, the shuttles will land straight in the bay, automated from liftoff to transport to the stars, straight into the belly of a metal giant that will lead the people to a new land. No one leaving Earth will have this view.
I’ll never return, now, drifting on the waves of stardust, breathing in the scent of burning stars, filling my lungs with frozen starlight.
I spin myself, swirling gently, the tether snapped, too far away for the humans to survive getting me now. The bots are programmed to human safety standards. They won’t retrieve me, and I’ve gone the wrong way to join the atmosphere’s debris, a fiery human meteorite.
A last glimpse of homesick planetside existence, and I let the stars embrace me, one last time.
