The Darkest Point of Night

Every bit of starlight we see is ancient. The night sky is a tapestry of twinkling relics flung across millions of lightyears, eons from when they first burned. Even after a star dies, its light may linger for eternities as it travels across the cosmos, like the last strains of a song still echoing after the players cease. To gaze into the night is to be haunted by a bygone universe.

Back home, even the light of the sun had to embark on an eight-minute journey across millions of miles to caress the face of earth. To think, I once basked in starlight only eight minutes old. Infantile by cosmic standards.

I can still technically see the sun from where I sit typing this out – a little yellow pinprick through the porthole. But how old is that light now? Warmthless, lifeless, expired light, still straining to reach her children as we stray ever further.

I’ve probably been spending too much time in the ship’s planetarium.

I’m so far now from that star and her accompanying blue planet. I abandoned my old life so long ago. I destroyed those letters the same night I found them, but even here, years and light years away, every word burns brilliantly in my mind's eye like so much dead starlight.

I found the letters by mistake, in a box swiped I from Mom’s closet the night I ran away. When you’re older, even older than when I decide to give this letter to you, I may explain a little more about my childhood, but suffice to say that you would never have met your grandma even if we did all live in the same solar system. I left in a hurry, gathering my own few things and swiping anything else that looked even slightly pawnable. My hysterical tears and swollen-shut left eye weren’t making it any easier – souvenirs from the last conversation I’d ever have with Mom.

That night, carrying everything I owned (and a few things I technically didn’t), I already knew I would never set foot in that house again. I just didn’t realize how far I’d get.

My first night alone was spent sorting through the random loot I grabbed in my mad dash. As most of it was worthless, I didn’t have much hope for whatever was in the box. That turned out to be a special kind of worthless. Inside was a thick stack of handwritten letters from Mom, all addressed to me. The first was dated eight months before I was born.

The words made my bruises and my heart ache. Page after page of how excited she was to be a mom. Paragraphs burst with lofty expectations I obviously didn’t live up to; every word sickly saturated with a love I would never be shown. Just empty sentiment. The fluffy, immaterial dreams of a silly girl who’d grow into a cruel woman.

After thumbing through the letters once, I dumped the whole lot in a storm drain.

But from the moment I found out you were on the way, I haven’t been able to get those letters off my mind. It's not that I want to do the same - her letters were about possibilities and dreams that wouldn’t come true, expectations that would turn to disappointment and then rot into resentment. There’s no room for hopes or new possibilities for you. We already know what every day, down to your last, will look like.

So, really, this is an apology.

I’m not writing this because I expect forgiveness. Just like finding out Mom maybe loved me at one point never made up for all the misery she put me through, I know reading this won’t change anything. But maybe as you spend your entire life hemmed in by steel hulls, suffocated in the arms of starlight, you’ll find some solace in knowing I at least felt bad for putting you here.

I could lie and say I did it all for a greater good, but I figure you’ll hear enough of that ‘future of humanity’ spiel. The ship’s whole mission was sold around that pitch – the glorious, century-long journey into deep space to seed humanity on our new intragalactic home, with we, the crew, painted as selfless, pioneering heroes. I think it’s like putting a sugar coating on pills; makes the whole thing easier to swallow. If we all tell ourselves we did this for a grand reason, foisting this life on not just ourselves, but on our children, and our children’s children, for a purpose greater than all of us, maybe we can keep our sanity. Maybe it does bring comfort to some. If the belief in something greater helps buoy you through this life, who am I to knock it?

Still, there are worse places to spend a lifetime of sacrifice. The ship is the size of several cities, the greatest singular structure ever built. Tens of thousands of passengers live and work on hundreds of decks, fed by acres of greenhouses. She has libraries, lounges, forest-sized terrariums, farms, a lagoon, planetariums, conservatories, arcades, an ice-skating rink, and supposedly a speak-easy that I still have yet to find (not that it would do me any good for the next few months). Outside, in the cold embrace of eternity, her mighty hull declares her name for no eyes to read – the New Colossus.

It’ll probably be one of the first things you hear, one of the first things you attempt to babble out. They’ll teach you her history in school, you’ll make little clay models of her in class, and if the current punk trends are the same in sixteen-ish years, you may get her name tattooed on yourself in a fit of teenage rebellion. Evidently the name is from some old poem, written for an old statue, which referenced an even older statue.

It’s a bit of a convoluted history, but I do like the poem. Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses. It was about welcoming weary travelers to new, brighter beginnings. I was certainly tired, poor, and huddled when I found myself applying to the New Colossus program.

Many of the first gen passengers aboard the ship, including your father and I, also aided in building her. I hope you learn about the New Colossus construction from the laborers – welders like the woman across the hall, carpenters like your father, people who pieced her together with their own hands. When they speak about the building of the ship, there’s a reverence there better suited set to the notes of a hymn, not the buzz of angle grinders. An entire city sprung up around the shipyard; millions of hands dedicated to the most ambitious cause ever undertaken. Hope is stitched into the very bones of this place.

I worked alongside the others, but I don’t have the same stars in my eyes. I joined the project because I was a starving runaway, and figured they were desperate enough to hire me without looking too closely at my work-of-fiction resume. When the project finished, I didn’t apply to ship out because I was feeling particularly heroic or pioneering. I just needed another gig.

At the risk of sounding cold and calculating, I’ll admit that that’s a significant factor in why I married your dad. I knew him vaguely from our time doing construction, and he seemed nice enough, but we didn’t get together until our application process for boarding.

And I mean that literally. I had spent days camped out in the crowded, muggy warehouses serving as the application hub, surrounded by cots and folding chairs, and thousands upon thousands of other hopefuls waiting in lines for paperwork, physicals, and blood tests. Thousands of people far more qualified, more eager than I was. I was getting antsy. Which was stupid because I didn’t even care about the ship really, I was just looking for a new spot, and I had no prospects on earth, and I didn’t know where else to go, and... I found myself sharing my lament with the young carpenter by my side – he seemed to show up a lot. We’d accidentally formed a sort of buddy system in the surging seas of applicants. He responded off-handedly in his gruff, low way – though he wouldn’t look me in the eye - that young married couples had a significantly better chance of being boarded. I asked if he wanted to improve our odds. He agreed. The rest of our relationship has followed the same theme of pragmatism. Some people don’t get it, but it works for us.

After that, we were a shoo-in. I had no skills to speak of, but that didn’t matter. I wasn’t needed to establish a new world – I wouldn’t live to see it. For the first generations aboard, the mission just needed breeding stock, and we were young, strong, and fertile. I couldn’t believe it was that easy. When I signed up, I didn’t consider what that really meant, didn’t care. I was thinking about a warm, clean cabin and guaranteed hot meals for the rest of my life. Not humanity, not distant worlds, not a righteous purpose. Not you.

I didn’t think of you.

Not until long after the launch; After the earth-bound branch of humanity broke thousands of bottles of champagne on the ship’s bow; After we broke through the stratosphere, the warm blue cradle of the sky giving way to black; After our sun, the primordial lantern that had lit the path of every ancestor, shrank away until it was just another distant star.

Not until baby strollers clogged the halls, and tottering feet pitter-pattered on every deck like a fall of spring rain. The New Colossus was essentially a nursery for the first years of her maiden voyage. And it turned my stomach.

We, the first gen, the earth-born, made the conscious decision to leave. But the little toddler with her pudgy fingers pressed to a porthole’s glass, doe eyes luminous with the light of a thousand suns whose warmth she will never feel – what choice did she have? We wax on about the honor in sacrifice, but does she feel honored to sacrifice something she never even had the option to keep?

I became obsessed with the ship’s timeline. It was a drastic change in my life, knowing what the next day, every day, would bring. As a child, every creaky house and ratty apartment I lived in was an altar to instability. What kind of mood would Mom wake up in, or had she even come home the previous night? Would she remember to pay the utilities, or would I be doing my homework in the dark? Even during the few good seasons we had, when she was sober and on the right meds, I could only wonder how long that spell would last. The answer was always not long enough. Life was even more uncertain after I ran away. For the first few months, I usually woke up not knowing where my next meal would come from, or where I’d bed down by the day’s end. So, suddenly having an exact calendar and itinerary for the next century was both comical and unsettling.

112 years 9 months 3 days total, to be exact. You can trace the ship’s calendar all the way from launch to landing. There are pre-marked events and holidays scattered throughout – launch anniversaries, harvest fests in the tera-domes, the best time to see certain stars or systems as we pass by. It’s all there. I know approximately where we’ll be in the universe when the kids around me become adults and start to have children of their own. And when their children will have children. Where the first Galapagos tortoise hatched aboard, Shelly, will celebrate her 50th birthday. I can estimate roundabouts where I’ll grow old and die. And what the stars outside will look like when I do.

The day that has always troubled me the most is marked in big sunshiny yellow letters - Zenith Day. It marks the exact halfway point of the mission. By the time the day is over, we’ll be closer to our new home than we are to Earth. To me, the name seems so wildly unfitting it borders on cruel. My many trips to the planetarium taught me that in astronomy, a zenith is the highest point of the sun, or solar noon. One could argue it’s the proverbial height of our mission, the shift from a departure to an arrival, but it’s also the farthest we will all ever be from the warmth of a sun. For every solar zenith, on the exact opposite side of the globe is in the nadir- the deepest, darkest point of night, as far from the light of day as you can be.

With that sickeningly cheery holiday haunting me from the distant future, I knew I wouldn’t be partaking in the ‘launch boom’ happening around us. We decided to wait a bit before starting a family. And we did. Waited. And waited. The kids around us became older siblings as a second wave of strollers came. They started school – little lines of kindergarteners bouncing down the hallways to class. I waited still. A dozen years passed before I thought I could bear the idea of bringing you here. You’ll be middle aged by the time we reach Zenith Day. You almost certainly won’t live to walk on real ground. If you choose to wait as long as possible to have children too, your kids will be sixty-ish by the time we land. The few years I waited won’t make a difference at all.

I’m not showing yet (I think) but by now all our neighbors know we’re expecting. Nothing stays private for long here – gossip can’t help but echo in a tin can, your father always says. I’ve never really gotten used to it, but I guess you’ll never have anything else to compare it to. They’re all excited for us, though. The old lady from two units over gave us a little crocheted model of the New Colossus, along with some crocheted stars and planets, meant to be hung from a mobile. The New Colossus is an almost inescapable motif and a symbol of pride to just about everyone. You’ll see pins, magnets, plushies, and cross-stitching of the proud hull. We even have a beautiful wooden carving of her sitting on our coffee table, hand-made by your dad. I don’t mind it usually. But for some reason, holding that tiny yarn ship, all I could feel was dread. I thanked her, trying to keep my voice from shaking, and as soon as we were back in our own unit, immediately sent the ship down the recycling chute. The stars and planets will hang over your crib, but not the ship. It seemed too cruel to have the place where you are already damned to live forever be one of the first things you lay eyes on. Womb and grave dangling above you.

Your father watched me put the little ship in the bin but said nothing. I know he’s been worried lately, though. I can feel the weight of his furrowed brow from across the room even now. He cares, but he just doesn’t understand why I’m grappling with what I can’t control. Like I said, he’s pragmatic. Things are the way they are. We can’t change that we’re on a ship none of us will ever step off of. I hope you get his steady, practical nature. It seems to make for a more peaceful existence. Will it be easier for you if you don’t ask the same questions that torment me?

Maybe it would be better for all of us if everyone asked less questions. If we never looked into the night to wonder what’s up there and then got to work building the damn machines that would take us there.

Will you be content and unquestioning, or will you scourge yourself with the same what-ifs that haunt me? Will you read this someday and understand why I made the choices I did, or will these words just make you hate me that way I hated her? When you look out at eternity will you see the cold and darkness, or the spots of light and possibility shining within them? When you look at your fellow crewmates, your father and I, at yourself, will you see us as in-betweens, as people with a finite purpose meant to get us from one place to the next, or as believers and pioneers and dreamers?

When Zenith Day comes in some distant future, will you imagine the golden caress of noon sunlight, or the cold clasp of darkest midnight?

I love you.

I’m sorry.