Today’s Routine
Today’s Routine
0600:
Wake up, suspended from the ceiling like a trapped fly or a caterpillar gaining consciousness too soon. Zero gravity was an easier adjustment than this daily jolt, but as her wits and sense of place revive, the astronaut yawns and reaches out to unzip her nylon cocoon.
0700:
Science opens her day, once awkward bathing rituals are done. She launches herself toward the lab module, feet first down a narrow white tube like an unrushed bobsledder, sealed coffee thermos clutched in hand. Tasks fill the mind and quiet the void the empty silence leaves inside, where her human heart once beat against its cage. Tend plants: check. Upkeep hydroponics: check. Tend canaries (her only companions these weeks/months/hours) and test soil samples for bacterial vitality. Check and check, more knowledge gained for a (possible) future. And just as important!(her superiors used to tell her) keep up herself: treadmill, bone density, circulation, muscle strength, mental eval —
Maybe later.
1200:
Lunch is spent floating in a bubble window, the earth thousands of miles below. She takes listless bites of reconstituted beef and ponders geosynchronicity. Planet and spacecraft step together in perfect time as she looks down and sees, again, the same bit of ground she’s seen every day since Day 1. The line of darkness begins its encroachment. She counts the sparse lights of night as each blinks on, hoping for just one more than yesterday. (Each newly unlit spot aches inside her.) Despite the kinship she feels with the sunny patch below — her long-time dancing partner — the one place she’d like to see still lies over that shadowed horizon and out of reach.
1300:
Maintenance keeps her breathing and not on fire (she’s running low on duct tape) but no spacewalk is required today, she notes with disappointment. Armoring herself against the vacuum with a few sheets of fancy plastic and a fishbowl seems reasonable and worth the risk, just to swim a few feet closer to another human life. She ignites the thrusters long enough to hold the craft in orbit one more day.
1800:
Dinner. Her body is hungry; her being is famished. She finds herself lost in the canaries’ small voices, tepid meal forgotten as the bright birds sing in the coalmine of her psyche. Her free hours fly into the dark.
2200:
Day’s end requires her to finish the log (she wonders who reads it anymore) before she sleeps. Science: check. Maintenance: check. Self-care: check. Mental state:
…
She can’t avoid it any longer, stares down the screen and fiddles with her thermos lid (maybe calming tea will help), but can’t reduce to words the chaos in the silence. “I am still here,” she types at last, powers down, climbs back into her cocoon and waits to begin the routine again.
