Falling Up
Written in 2015 as a descriptive essay for my AP Lang class. It captures my wonder with space. Fiction.
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Thunk. He rolled over, fingers skittering like spider legs for purchase against the crumbly ground. The smell of burnt metal flooded his senses, clouding his mind, and he tasted iron, yet he felt like he had fallen into an ice bath. Straining, shivering like a thin wire exposed from its plastic insulation, he latched onto something that felt solid - perhaps a rock - and he held onto it. He floated upside-down for a moment. Then, using the object as his anchor, he pulled himself down until he could curl over and plant his heavy white boots onto the dusty ground. He released his fingers and stood up in jerks, like a crushed aluminum can attempting to re-inflate. His insides groaned like they had been wrung, stretched, and twisted through a taffy machine. His head felt as if it were spinning around and around on the tip of a basketball player’s finger.
Oxygen? Check. Radio? Not sure. He could only hear his own jagged breaths, which punctuated the inside of his helmet with tumbleweeds of static. The ground in front of him was black and obsidian mountains rolled in the silent distance. Olive green light rose softly from behind the mountains and faded up into a sky of infinite black, black so dark that it made charcoal look white, black as dark as a million layers of India ink and the mysterious center of a raven’s eye. The darkness felt like a heavy velvet shroud, stifling, suffocating. In that canvas of nothingness he spotted one blue, glowing marble whose milky surface reflected white and green swirls. Home, he thought, feeling one more light year away.
Here, the days ran faster, and he watched as the olive light grew bigger and rose and turned golden. The light dissolved away at the darkness, drawing away transparent curtains. As infinite as the blackout had been, he now saw an infinite number of shimmering points of starlight. Some points of light were bigger and brighter and sharper than the others. Some pinpricks glowed hazy and soft and looked like the ghosts left by rubber erasers, forgotten and distant against the dark. All the tiny lights, while not moving, were so numerous that they seemed to vibrate and tango before his eyes, stirred by his inability to fathom such a storm of glitter. He felt like a microscope attempting to zoom out to see the bigger picture, but the picture was too grand to grasp. In the pulsating vortex he spotted a nebula, a cloud of azul fire dashed with smoky crimson that glimmered like a translucent fish tail. A black cloud floated over the phosphorescent fish and as it passed, the cloud’s fiery tendrils crackled with white light, causing halos to bloom against his visor when he attempted to focus on them.
He had no bearings, for even the ground he stood on was as black and silent and as unknown as the bottom of the ocean. He swiveled his head in all directions like a broken camera spinning aimlessly, unable to focus on a point, and he felt like he was falling up, up into a pearlescent vortex which sparkled with a prismatic soup of colors that were sharp and hard, and silvery and vaporous. He screamed, or at least his vocal cords frayed themselves in a wild beast’s primal scream, but the sound melted against the hot, padded walls of his helmet and sploshed back into his eardrums, translated by a poor scribe into bursts of muddy, gurgling static. And the darkness never heard him.