Pilgrims
A scene sketch written in 2018
“So what?” she says.
“What do you mean so what?” he says.
“I mean it doesn’t matter. Even if you slept with someone else we’re leaving tomorrow forever so… so what.” She shrugs.
“But this—we can’t be living together at the Station like this.”
“Why not, I’m sure we’re not the only ones.”
He sighs… Remember for us how we arrived at this point. How you two have flown through life together from youth to yearning to this precipice where you shudder in fear and she stands in awe. How this was yours and it became hers and somehow you lost her in the process…
She continues, “We’ve spent the last two years preparing for tomorrow. What is it? If it’s not someone else then what?”
“It’s everything! We’ll never be back and there’s so much we’re about to miss out on and you shouldn’t be so nonchalant about the whole thing. It scares me that you’re so willing to cut ties with an entire planet with such ease.”
“We’re sacrificing our lives here to be on the forefront there.”
“Don’t play the company line on this.”
She says, exasperated, “What’re you doing? We already went through all this.”
The light fades into gold and pink, refracting through the slats in the blinds, heavy from the west. They sit on the couch in their living room, twelve hours to launch.
“You decided it wasn’t a thing and I squashed my doubts,” he says.
“Well that’s your own goddamn fault.”
“I’m starting to feel like it’s like we volunteered for space prison, right?, and it’s a life sentence for us and probably our kids.”
“You know they’ll all get their chance to see our home. But this won’t be theirs. It’ll be a foreign planet overstuffed with strange people and bad weather.” She wants him to see it several different ways, how it’ll all be alright at least in some shape, how… “I’m tired of you being a coward.”
They look out upon dawn in a shimmer of memory, the light aglow in her hazel eyes, him knee deep in the water with his hands in his pockets—clouds pink-white and thoughts of how forever after he felt frozen in that space: five feet in front of her, a thousand miles distant in his daze. “Have you ever thought about whether or not I want you there?”
“Is that what you’re saying?”
“Especially if you’re gonna be some chickenshit little boy who refuses to grow up. We’ve been together so long already that I know your tendencies—I know what you’re about to do once we get there in four months. And I don’t want to be around for it.”
“And what, and you’re not gonna be homesick too?”
What does your future hold, O travelers… the rocket’s running out of fuel and it’ll soon fall as it may just as you take off once and for all, the pieces of a relationship broken and jimmyrigged and floating before you as set off to travel and travel and travel until you reach the dry red seas.
“That’s not what I’m implying,” she says.
“Then what are you getting at?”
“I don’t want you around. Is that blunt enough? And this whole thing scares the shit out of me.”
“Then why are you being so gung-ho about it?”
“Because someone’s got to. I mean, Jesus Christ, we can’t just mope our way to Mars and be miserable the entire time. We’ve got a lot of life left to live and it’s all gonna be up there and I really don’t want it to suck.”
“So why aren’t we backing out?”
“Because that’s the dumbest, most selfish thing we could do.”
“So you’re calling me dumb and selfish, neat.”
“Am not,” she says, “I’m just saying that what we’re about to do is far greater than our happiness and you need to see through our shit to see that the needs of the entire Earth outweigh our own.”
“So we go, I guess.”
“Look, we had our chance to break up for good five years ago. And maybe in another five years it’ll be different, who knows.”
Set adrift in a sea of remembrance, they arc their backs to the sky and let the light pour down and dissolve into their love. Ever and always they tussled and sought a way out but they were afraid or determined or…
“This is all of it and this is everything,” she says as she moves closer to him on the couch and puts her head on his shoulder.