Author: James Gonda

At the hotel in West Texas, a low structure with a lobby that smells of citrus and air conditioning, I unpack my bag: one pair of walking shoes (the soles caked with dust from Jordan), three dress shirts, a pack of almonds, and a paperback, its bookmark a receipt from the Reykjavík airport. I set my passport on the nightstand and wonder if it will be needed beyond the mesosphere.

The pre-flight center is white-walled and emptier than imagined.

There are five other passengers. We do not converse beyond what is necessary.

A nurse checks our vitals with the detachment of someone measuring weather.

Numerous techs in zippered vests move through the room with practiced economy. They do not explain what they’re doing; the work, checks and small corrections, speaks for itself.

A safety officer repeats the phrase zero gravity until it sounds like an apology. Weightlessness, she explains, will be brief—which I already know. Brief was my stay in Phnom Penh with a fan that refused to rotate. Brief was the hand of a stranger passing bread through a train window somewhere in Slovakia. They dress me in blue—not sky blue, a darker, institutional shade that resists metaphor.

Outside, the rocket stands like a giant Sharpie marker pointing toward the sky. Its curve resembles the silos I passed on a Greyhound through Nebraska.

I told my children what fit their image of me: eccentric, stubborn, mostly benign, careful with details. It was easier that way. But why space, Dad? Because I haven’t seen space which in my language means because it hasn’t seen me. The truth? I want to be small again. I have grown too large in the world; too known in places I do not expect to be remembered. A waitress in Kyoto once brought me tea without asking. A boy in Fez waved from a rooftop. A woman in Buenos Aires touched my shoulder and said, You always leave.

The harness clicks shut across my chest.

The cabin hums.

At T-minus ten I remember a footpath outside Nairobi where a girl showed me how to balance a jug of water on my head. I feel that uprightness again as the countdown ticks by. I have counted many things in life: Pills. Currency. Visa days. Steps across an unstable bridge in Bhutan. But never so publicly or to the rhythm of machines.

At liftoff, the cabin shakes. The push feels more like pressure than motion.

I let it take me.

Then a sudden hush when the engines drop away.

The harness holds me, lightly; it’s a negotiation with a new set of terms.

I peer out the little window and through the fragile lid of atmosphere look for the outline of coastlines. I search for the house in Ludhiana where I was born but it’s in another hemisphere. I breathe more slowly, as if my lungs require less.

Before too long there’s the faint return of pressure, the suggestion of gravity.

The harness tightens.

The hush thins and, in its place, a low, gathering sound.

Back on Earth, I sign a form to acknowledge the trip and accept a pin shaped like the rocket. The flight took only eleven minutes. In the bathroom’s mirror, I adjust my collar and consider no one is ever ready to come back so soon. But time, like light, bends. And somewhere in that curve I saw my whole life as a single, uttered thing.