Goodbye, Houston

He looked up at the sky, spotting the distant blue planet.  It seemed so remote, so distant.  He was, of course, cosmically close, yet the sheer distance on a human scale was daunting.  He glanced around to get his bearings.  The landscape was grey and rocky, like a monochrome desert back home.  It reminded him of the photos of the Great Depression he had seen in his History class.  School seemed so long ago.  It was all part of a journey that climaxed with him being here, yet all his nostalgia stole him away, back to his youth.

He remembered his childhood friends, building model rockets and watching them fly into the daytime sky.   His first time holding a girl’s hand had been at his local park where he launched most of those rockets.  His first bicycle had prompted him to paint his helmet white and taped toilet paper rolls to the bike in an effort to make it look like a spaceship.

His academic years were spent delved in athletics and studies.  He found himself longing for more of a social youth, yet his perfect grades and enormous scholarships were a direct result of his hard work.  He remembered recieving his acceptance letters, first to college, then to NASA.  He remembered his training as a long, grueling process which would have proved impossible without his years of Cross Country.

He snapped back to the present.  In a moment of weakness, he shed a tear.  It itched as it slid down his cheek, and he couldn’t wipe it away.  The suit was bulky and difficult to move in.  Despite this, the visor was sealed and he just had to deal with it.

The dust held his footprints, which he noticed and decided to follow back to the lander.  The idea saddened him, but there was little else left to do.  After an indeterminate amount of time, he crested a hill and spotted the lander.

He wondered if there had been anything else he could have done.  There were so many things he could have done different, but would any of it have mattered?  How could he know.  As he approached, he could survey the lander closer.  He had left in a furor earlier and had not stopped to view the damage.   He could see the ruptured fuel tank and the small valley below where the lunar dust had blown away while the tank vented.  He could see the empty cylinder which seemed so simple and vacant, yet so foreboding.

He switched his radio on and took a second to stare back at the Earth.  He imagined he could see the radio waves with his own eyes as they travelled so simply back home, making the trip in seconds and resting in the temperate American south.

“Goodbye, Houston”, he said as he switched his radio off for the last time.