September 5, 2010
from the comments
It took longer than my father said to reach Mars. The landscape was always changing, which led us to forego the naming and claiming of place that had guided our Earthly rituals. Time passed in ways none of us had ever felt before, someone would leave for what seemed a few hours, only to find out that weeks had passed. In this way we grew old before we noticed, which made the end all the more bearable, slipping into another dream much like the one we were leaving. My father never told us, and we never knew. My sister said we never reached Mars, that our minds filled in the gaps that were left as we looked at the planet approaching ever so slowly through the slits in our craft. West with the night, up with the dark, I slept and dreamed of gathering burning drops of sunlight, plucking as if from a vine in a stellar garden all across the hull. Stars were small bits of burning blue, as if sliced from a diamond as big as my head, but the sun drops were smoldering, boiling but cool to the touch. I tried to eat one and woke up, a metallic taste lingering in my mouth. Later that month we reached the planet, and I found my father crying as he knelt in the dust.
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Said it before, I’ll say it again–Splendid, Amanda Mae. All exploration begins with imagination. This makes impossible journeys something we are doing now. How will love fare in the desert? That is the only story.