Sometimes I would wear the astronaut costume my mom had made around our house. One day my brothers got the ladder out for me and let me climb onto the roof of our house. They got every leaf they could find from the whole neighborhood and set up a pile big enough for me to jump in. My oldest brother, Billy, even made a new helmet for me just for the jump—an old motorcycle helmet that he painted white for me. He had to sell his motorcycle off a while before, to help mom.
The jump then was nothing like it actually is though, out here. There’s no falling in space. You only fall on the earth. Here there’s just floating; it’s not possible to fall.
I know Billy still thinks about the motorcycle. He had built it himself and sold it after only a month of having it. We were selling anything at the time. Billy never mentions the motorcycle, but Nick will. Billy says that Nick blames me for what happened with mom. Nick says if I had started working instead of going to school than Mom would have been fine. And maybe he’s right. I wasn’t working. I went to school instead. But she told me to go. Nick doesn’t know the story, but I couldn’t sleep one night, and Mom was still awake (she never slept at night). She poked her head in, and saw that I was awake and said to me, “I want you to go to school. I know your brothers want you to start working with them, and I know you think you should. But I want you to go to school. I don’t want you to stay around here just for me. I made you the astronaut costume when you were young because that was your dream. But now you can go out and get yourself a real one. I don’t want you to miss out on doing what you want to do.”
After I left for school there were a few times I almost quit and came back. They had stopped buying Mom’s medication, but Billy said she was the one who told them to. It wouldn’t have made a difference either. We can only make life last so long.
There was a girl at school named Risa, who was impressed with me. She knew I’d be going up someday, just like I did, but it didn’t seem to bother her that I wouldn’t always be around. Sometimes even though she wanted to be supportive I knew she didn’t really want me to go. We tried to talk to other couples about it. Some of the astronauts I met had talked about how their wives treat them differently when they come back, as if under the surface there’s some seething anger that they left for a time at the cost of being away from the intricate moments of life with them. I remember hearing from one of the wives about how she wasn’t mad that he had gone away, but that after he had come back he was different. He wasn’t present with her anymore. He was looking up at the sky and wanting a few more minutes out in space, instead of looking at her and wanting her. She said it felt to her like he was always wanting to get away from her, and not ever wanting to get to her.
There’s something called the “Overview Effect.” That’s the term for the sense of awe that astronauts have when they look at the earth from space. I remember when I first saw the earth from out here, you can really see the curve of the it. I started to understand then that every moment of life on the earth really isn’t all there is, that the earth really is just one small place, but life is not confined to the moments we spend walking on our planet. I tried to tell Billy about it once, but I couldn’t really get the words out to explain it. I don’t know how to explain an unearthly feeling with earthly words. It’s like trying to explain what kissing someone is like. You can describe what happened, but you can’t really ever say what the feeling is like.
Even now I’ll think about Nick. I know he was only angry because he had wanted to go on and do something big too. But I think he was wrong to be that way. I think he wasted all that time—not because going to space, seeing the earth, floating out here, and having these unearthly feelings aren’t worth wanting, but because somehow he had something more. He had those close moments. I wish I had been there for Mom before she passed away. Nick had really been there—faithfully through all the sad times.
Out here I have my dream. I became what I wanted to be and what my mother told me to be. But if I could go back and rewrite my life I would. I would have given myself failure instead of success, or spent my time giving more than I was getting. Having my dream wasn’t really what I wanted. I think that to have loved Billy more, and Nick, and my mom, and even Risa—somehow to have stayed and loved those around me would have been better than chasing a dream that took me away from loving the people that were trying to love me, and looking for my love.
