How does it feel? Does it feel real?
This first part is not unlike other landings. Red Dawn has detached from her tether and they are once again weightless. They have been looking forward to this, the beautiful drifting, with Earth visible in the screen. Helen instructs herself to truly feel this moment, memorize it, leave nothing out, and then realizes she will fail in this exercise. She can think “Oh” and “How lovely” while she prepares for the next thing, but she cannot take in everything.
She is, she finds, afraid. Not of making a mistake. This is fear of dying. Helen tries to locate the fear in her body, give it a space to exist. It is not in her throat or chest, it is lower. The fear is new and must be welcomed like any newborn, held in two hands. Helen wishes she could ask Sergei and Yoshi if they are also afraid, because it means something, this fear, and she is a little proud of it too.
Red Dawn begins her burn. It is time to slow down, to fall with the intention to hit. It is an odd sensation, as if someone were shoving you in the stomach and instead of going backward, you went forward. You know the direction you are going, but it doesn’t feel like you are going there. Going, went. None of the words do the work you want them to, they are all clumsy and contradictory. Sergei’s “Pfff” says it all. Helen tunes in to Yoshi, who is speaking to Mission Control, narrating the things that are happening. He sounds like a chanting monk, intoning wisdom. She is happy and afraid.
Landings take time. They are going to do a little tumbling now, a little jostling. This will last almost an hour, as Red Dawn makes her adjustments and begins her elliptical approach, touching the outer atmosphere of Earth.
So many things in life just happen, without the sensation that you are crashing repeatedly with great speed into a brick and steel wall, accompanied by a roaring noise. Your father slips and falls and hits his head, your daughter grows up, your husband dies in a parking lot: these are quiet events, so unbelievably quiet, you could miss them if you weren’t standing right there or had your eyes closed. You did miss them, sometimes. No matter how violent and terrible.
Maybe your husband never loved you, maybe your daughter will never comprehend your love. Maybe you have always been alone like Michael Collins, with something between you and the Earth. These are things a person needs to be helmeted for, strapped down into a custom molded seat, medicated against nausea, called a hero for enduring. But these are the things that you will walk upright with, must wear with no more ceremony than you would a sweater.
Did she stand on Mars? Can she stand on Earth and hold her daughter?
It’s all she wants to do, right now. That’s why she is afraid.
Also, Helen is afraid because she knows that after she holds her daughter, she is probably going to want to do this all again, want it just as much as she ever has.
They are stabilizing now, the upper atmosphere catching them. Helen can rotate her head inside her helmet just enough to see a window screen. The view at one hundred fifty thousand meters above the Earth in a spacecraft is very old-timey hell: sparking flames and evil-looking vapors. It is getting warmer now. She can feel the sweat on her body. Gravity.
This landing will not be the same as the other times. She will not have the sensation of her spine, having lengthened over two inches in the course of weightless months, crunching back down. She will not feel like someone is sitting on top of her head. She will not, two days after landing, finish writing a note to herself and then put the pen in the air where she expected it to stay and be surprised by it dropping to the floor, of all places. Her body has changed, oh yes, but not from gravity.
Six thousand meters above the Earth now, everything is going very well. The screen is black, and then this blackness melts away and is replaced by blue.
The blue is sky. Their own blue sky. Sweetly blue, perfectly, wondrously, uniquely blue. Earth.
Before, after you landed, a hatch was opened and arms reached in to pull you out and it was a kind of mad cacophony, an onslaught of colors and smells and voices and things. And you were very sick and your body hurt and you wanted to lie down in a quiet, dark, still place, and shut your eyes. But now, it will not be this way. Not only because you will be perfectly able to stand on your own, but because now you are essentially a Martian who has come to Earth.
But the Earth beneath your feet will be the real Earth, and the sky above you will be the real sky, and the daughter or the son or the wife you hold in your arms will be your real daughter or son or wife. And for a moment those arms will be the only place it matters to have gone. For a moment. Because then you will lift your head to the heavens, as humans have always done, as they must. And you will wonder.
The love that brings you back to Earth is not the same love that makes you want to leave this Earth, it is not the same love, no, but it is no less a love. It is love too, that makes you lift your head and wonder.
But oh, for now, this sky, so sweetly blue, so perfectly, wondrously, uniquely blue. Nothing in the universe is this blue sky, this home, this place where the people you love are waiting for you, and you are not alone, and you will save this Earth, and be rescued on this Earth and from this Earth, and you will take to the skies once more, and nothing feels as free as this, and this feels real, it really does.