This is the part they rarely tell you about. The memory of solar dominance, of life never in one place, still ran in my people’s blood. Or so I was told; no one was still alive that had set foot in one of the fabled cruisers our people used to make or that had gazed on stars from out of a body unchained by home-gravity. And that was the part they rarely tell you about: space travel operates on more than just three-axis. Most of the journey, at least as far as they eye could tell, was through time. You stepped on to a ship and away from your life. That first step, as the door hummed to a close behind you, that first step was a lifetime.I am a lantern awash in a storm and he is flotsam that I found with me in the stream. How can I hold on to him when he is adrift just as I am, when he has nothing to hold on to himself?

Humanity is a chain. It is one tissue which feeds itself, extremities upon extremities that somehow, in the midst of groping hunger, feed each other. And space travel was sold to us, the people of Episcopal and a million-million other planets, like it was the great savior. The great release from the prison of community, the surgeon’s knife that would incise into the common flesh and free the individuals suffocating within. But, to me, it is no such thing. This is space for me: an impossible ocean that separates me from the life I knew, a life I had thrown away thinking it was too small. The irony is that at least the sailor on an endless ocean knows she has a goal, a beacon, a place to return to. I don’t have even that.

But if I’m truly honest, and on this, the eve of my arrival, I would like to be, I was always lost. The problem with my old life, my lost life, wasn’t that it was too small. It was that it was too big. And we dreamed. Oh, how we dreamed and in dreaming wounded ourselves every time we woke up to gaze on our bluish sun. A people of fools, of faint-hearted saps wilting in wax towers. Or so it seems to me now. But when I was there, still a child, the memories were the sweet taste of dripping honey, the faint buzz of a stomach that had gorged itself. Until the ships came, the beautiful, blue, rune-inscribed ships. I thought I could escape my hunger.

But nothing makes you more hungry than the stars. Now, the ship had decelerated enough so that I could make out individual stars out there, in the ocean. An ocean filled with stars, a deep heart for me to fill with starlight. The hunger is stronger than ever. The body besides me shifts and it has red hair, impossibly beautiful hair. In the corner of the room, I can hear my father’s hushed whispers as he speak of the mono-swords of the Late Crusaders. The wish-wish sound of my mother’s brush is his beat as she paints a purple scene of coronation. Thus, the cliche is all too real: the hunger was inside me. Forget the human tapestry, forget the organism which has no end, the body we call humanity. We are endless continuities, fragile repositories of liquid memory, songs, hope, fear and, most of all, longing. A longing for a home that isn’t there any more. A longing for a home that once was but is now separated from us by an empty ocean. A longing for a home that we carry with us and are thus incessantly reminded of its absence. The ship docks. The body wakes. My eyes open. I am alone.