Flash Meridian didn’t know what time it was. When you are no longer orbiting a star, time becomes obsolete. There is no sunrise. No sunset. No day or night.
He knew what day it was on earth … what time it was in Michigan. But it no longer had anything to do with him.
He would sit and think. Read. Eat. Sleep. But it all felt random and subjective.
It was stifling and liberating at the same time. It was not a luxury since there was no other to contrast it to out here.
He thought about his child, and imagined the children yet to come. The impossible children he longed for, like the one who had come and gone.
The longer he thought, the less he believed. All the while, he watched Poikani grow.
Poikani was proof that this could happen. Children could come. In his head, Flash invented them, and made up memories for them.
He experienced cool boredom in the monotony of his flight through uneventful space. His life wasn’t punctuated by big moments, and over time, he grew to not only tolerate this, but to settle into a deep gratitude in partnership with his friend Lem. He saw his life as a spiritual practice.
One day, he said to Lem, I’m too old. I’m alone.
He felt silly for dreaming of another child. For expecting the atoms to come together to form another thing like him.
Even as he thought this, or maybe it was hours … or days later … at any rate, a beep sounded from the radar screen. It could have been anything. A rock or metallic asteroid, a spaceship, a whale, or a pumpkin, adrift in the vast expanse. It was like fishing and feeling a tug on your line.