dear you

i have escaped the gravity of our world

the thrusters are no longer

firing

i depend on the word of other men

who linger in dark rooms

twirling pencils atop arcane calculations

watching my ship ascend to the stars

 

there is no seattle in space

vacant skies lightly colonized

by puffy tangerine clouds

neon streets wandering in unusual ways

they meander

like the veins of a sprawling metropolitan heart

that never

belonged to us

in the first place

 

away from you, i race to the stars

 

through this fish tank of a porthole

our world grows smaller

diminishing to mere blues and whites

becoming one more unfamiliar commodity

 

the space between us can only grow larger

and i am a blinking ship far from home harbor

 

i pass desert planets

coast between rocks, suspended

gas giants whose surfaces fill the porthole

until all i can see are their blind storm-filled eyes

glaring sightlessly at small, small me

 

if the universe were a room

i am weightless

a sprinkling of light in this dark space

pressed against invisible walls

choked with inertia

adrift,

alone

 

billions of light years away

i stare out the porthole and wonder

if i will ever see anything other

than stars i will never visit

 

our world has since expired from sight

too faint for even instruments to see

however much i turn the knobs and push the buttons

to make the space between us feel a little less

unapproachable

 

i saw a star die today

its flash cleaved through the dark

for one impermanent moment,

empty space was filled with color

 

so a secret:

i wish i would turn into a star

and you would too

so we could perfect the art of interstellar communication

and realize that this space between us

empty and dark

was not so terribly infinite

after

all