I am no god
So this is how it all ends.
A puff of smoke and our own personal orbit around the sun.
No jail yard banter.
No trading cigarettes or breaking rocks.
Just me and my crystal ship, ever circling the same bit of space.
Time, space, light and darkness the only realities.
Each of us so alone we might as well be dead.
For most cycles, I stare out into a space dotted by reflected lights.
Some are planets. Some are meteors or asteroids. Some are artificial satellites like my own.
I wonder if they see me as I pass in the night sky.
Or have they all gone crazy already, packing on their sentences inside their orbiting balls the way I do mine.
The state claims it will retrieve each of us when our sentence is done.
I suspect they will never come, our lives circumscribed by the half life of our power sources, our death and our ship’s one in the same.
Back on earth, before the sentencing, we all had various theories about how the state would bring us home.
Not one of us had heard of anyone who had actually come back.
On some days, the torture of loneliness is made worse by the appearance of earth.
My orbit is just near enough to make out the dual moving star I know is Earth and its moon.
No magnification can bring it into focus or give me any details.
But my desperate mind sketches in those things, oceans, continents, mountains and streams.
I try not to think of cities or people for the deeper ache they bring me.
I would give my right arm to stand on solid ground again.
Both arms to hear moving water or see a bird on wing.
I hear nothing but the on and off of clicking circuitry and see nothing but aspects of light and dark.
I would give a lung for a single breath of air without the stench of filtration, and half my tongue for the taste of water or food free of chemicals.
I once believed I could survive any sentence the state imposed and that my drinking in starlight and the massive beauty of orbiting spheres could sustain me better than the flawed interactions I always had with other people.
I am no god.
Pure perfection strains my mind.
I know without a flaw somewhere in my universe I shall soon go crazy.
Perhaps now I know why God needed so desperately to create man.
To keep from going crazy, too.