The Entire Universe

29 May 2041

Dearest Barbara,

Hello from way up here, my love.

If you’re asking, yes, these colours are richer than you can ever imagine. Not even the most powerful of telescopes, not a satellite image, could ever encapsulate the pillow-like clouds and the swirls of turquoise, magenta, and dark orchid unfurling before me. Then, just as my jaw couldn’t drop enough, these jagged constellations unique to the Helveria Galaxy scintillate like large cut gems. It’s as if the stars strung themselves together into a hand to paint all this onto an infinite, ever growing canvas.

And yet, as the bejewelled vastness fills my capsule with the tints of a million years of expansion and contraction, my grip can’t help reaching into my pockets and pulling out that dogeared photo I have guarded for a decade. Just a study of your midnight eyes and those gold curls rivalling the sun, and every hue in every crevice of space falls into a black hole.

Oh, how I can hear the tinkle of your laughter even in this vacuum, darling. I could imagine you under the incandescent glow of those fairy lights you insisted on stringing on the walls of our living room, shaking your head with a coy smirk on your lips, and sighing out ‘Jon!’ Your blue gaze on this letter would then sparkle with that delicious mischief that captured me ten years ago at that university pub. Instantly, all is well.

What I would give to be there next to you, to see you happy, to have the absolute magnitude of your smile surround me. Barbara, I want you always to remember this is all I want. If there’s anything I want you to engrave in the annals of your mind, it’s this: your happiness is the entire universe to me.

I want you to be as happy as you were the day I met you at The Grey Elk. I’ve told you this story countless times, but it’s true. I was in the middle of revising for my aeronautic engineering exams when Damian invited me to the pub. What you probably don’t know is how that best mate of mine had to literally had to pull me by the arm to get me out of my textbook-induced haze and out the door. Well, thank goodness I did come with him. As soon as I heard your evocative vibrato, beheld your delicate face and that silky turquoise jumpsuit reminiscent of Neptune’s surface, I was drawn to your gravity. I knew all I wanted was to be in your orbit. To my surprise, you felt the same way and had been observing me slumped down on my seat, like the Babylonians tracked the sky, from the stage you sang in. You tapped me on the shoulder, and that was it. An entire universe of happiness had been born in a Big Bang.

I want you to be as happy as you were that birthday of yours we spent at The Tate Postmodern. Oh, I can already imagine your regard rivalling Polaris now. Honestly, there’s nothing that shines more in my thoughts, far more than solar splendour, than how you your lips curl into a hairpin twist before biting into them in excitement every single time you recount the story of that little surprise I planned for you. I’d do it over and over again, darling. I would rehearse in front of the mirror once more, scrupulously striving to remove even a stardust-sized speck of suspicion when I suggested the museum as a celebration of your existence. I would flit around London like a comet once more, Damian in tow, whilst you were at your music teaching job just to find the paints and art supplies for my project. I would shell out an entire celestial body’s worth of money and drown myself in an ocean of emails once more to arrange the reservation of their rooftop gallery. All to watch you gasp as you walked in, astonished in taking in my valiant, frankly rudimentary attempt at painting you with the Milky Way draped over you like a gown. All to feel you wrap me in an embrace warmer than the sun’s molten core and shower me in so many kisses that my favourite shirt ever bears your magenta lipstick’s marks. Then, that would be it. An entire universe of happiness would be born in a Big Bang.

I want you to be as happy as you were when I asked you to be my wife. Oh, darling, if only you could be here, grinning at me bawling like the rains on Asteroid CH-1663. But even more so, how I long to be sat across you and have the first view of your gaze twinkling more diamantine than Andromeda at recalling my proposal. Even now, it all spins in the nucleus of my memory. You had just finished a show at the Planétarium in Paris when I asked you to take a drive with me. You had not even a particle of a clue that I was taking you to Le Jardin de Plantes, the same park that brings about the light of a thousand dawns on your countenance whenever you talk about your visits across the channel. There, with meadows of dark orchid-hued tulips as our witness, I declared with a banner --- one that Damian and I spent weeks preparing --- that I desired to share every single cosmos of my life with you. As you leapt into my arms and planted the softest kiss on my lips to say yes, I felt as if I were floating in deepest space, everything rooting me to Earth falling away. That was it. An entire universe of happiness had been born in a Big Bang.

Barbara, my love, my mission is and always will be to make you beam brighter than any supernova, and your unadulterated joy is my geocentre. I realise that for so long, you have simply tried to smile. It's hard, I know. Since I had started astronaut training at the UK Space Agency, you have been collecting nothing but fractals of me. Even in the weekly letters I received during training sessions, I could feel your heart crashing like a meteorite through every meticulously chosen word. Still, you stayed with me, my immovable axis, through circumstance pushing me through every distance.

…and this is why I want you to be happy, perhaps, in Damian’s arms.

I accidentally overheard your phone call to your sister, darling. It’s okay. I understand. How do you stay enamoured with someone lightyears away from you? Meanwhile, Damian has stayed ever sweet, ever present, constant as the ground your feet are firmly planted on. It’s just fair that he has slowly, without you intending it, eclipsed me in your affections. Yet, you still choose everyday to wake up by my side, push away what's in your mantle and core out of a care that has somehow never been quenched.

But now, it's my turn, Barbara. I want to show you all of me revolves around you.

He has no idea about how you feel. He has no idea how the tides have deftly turned in his favour. He has no idea how my tears are now as numerous as the stars I have seen from this rocket ship.

You asked me before dropping me off for my final training day why I was so adamant in joining the Ariel 26 mission. Yes, what I told you in the car, that I have been yearning to finally behold Helveria for decades, is true. More than that, though, I just want to watch Earth from the window of this little ball floating in space…and imagine your soul and that of my closest friend finally finding a home in each other.

It would make me the most ecstatic for you to reach for the moon, Barbara. Please don’t let this chance pass and end up wishing on a star for the opportunity to return. May the entire universe conspire to make you the happiest woman alive. My love for you burns brighter than Sirius. Always, it shall.

Adoring you wider than the galaxies,

Jon

****************

‘Commander Murray, it’s time to… what’s this?’

‘That’s a letter to Barbara. Please send it to her when you get back down, Victoria.’

‘Okay? But you need to evacuate. Or…’

‘I need to fix something. You go ahead.’

‘But Commander, you…’

‘Please. I must stay.'

*****************

ARIEL 26 COMMANDER CONFIRMED AS CASUALTY IN CAPSULE EXPLOSION

The UK Space Agency (UKSA) have identified Ariel 26 Commander Jonathan Murray as the sole casualty of the space capsule explosion on Wednesday, 29 May 2041, on the approach towards the protoplanet Zurykka....

....Commander Murray is survived by his fiancée, Barbara Prevost.

***********

Marriage Annoucements

Mr. D.D. Mansfield and Miss B.V. Prevost

The engagement is announced between Damian, eldest son of Mr. and Mrs. Thomas Mansfield of London, and Barbara, younger daughter of Mr. and Mrs. Charles Prevost of Gruyère, Switzerland.

Posted 22 May 2046