Five Minutes

Five minutes left.

Deep breaths, deep breaths.

I used to dream about being an astronaut. Space, "the final frontier", what could be more fascinating? But now that I'm here...I dream of being home again.

I'm the last one. Once it became inevitable that we would all die out here, I, like everyone else, came to grips with death- with never going back to Earth.

But I never thought I'd be the last one.

And it's just not really something you can prepare yourself for.

There's no food left, of course, and we ran out of water yesterday.

Or, I guess, I ran out of water yesterday.

I could do like the Donners and devour my dead shipmates bodies. But I'm going to die anyway, so what would be the point? I would just make my last moments more torturous.

For whatever reason, it takes a week, to the second, for this spaceship to self-destruct. We pressed the button last Tuesday at 7:53 PM, and eleven seconds.

So here I sit.

Tuesday, 7:41 PM.

Just waiting to die.

I stare at my hands. They're thinner than they've ever been, just skin on bones, and my fingernails are long and broken. I haven't had the heart to bite them. I close my eyes and think about rain. Summer rain, warm, wet, free. Fleeting, indecisive, wonderful. I want rain. I would give anything to feel rain on my face right now- not that I have much to give, in the present circumstances. I think about music. I play scraps of songs over in my head, wishing they would play now, out loud, wishing they would burst over the busted radio, blowing out my ears for my last few minutes. I think about the glamour becoming an astronaut presented. I think of my friend's expressions when I told them, how my boyfriend split us up because he said he couldn't wait for me, but how I couldn't have cared less because I was going to space.

Things can always go wrong, with anything and everything. Something always goes wrong. Some theater actors wait for something to go wrong, filled with fear until it does- because if it doesn't happen during a rehearsal, then it will happen during opening night.

But this. This is so much more than the lead coming down with the flu the day before the play is set to open. This is so much more than a thesis paper being deleted by a computer glitch. So much more than the streets closing because of an accident when a businessman needs to get the airport to make a meeting in Vancouver.

This is so much more.

7:46 PM.

I wish I could go to sleep. But we've been doing nothing but sleeping, hoping desperately to never wake up again, or to at least wake up on Earth, realize this was all a terrible nightmare.

Because of all those attempts at escape, I can't fall asleep now, when I need more than I ever have before to just be unconscious. To just close my eyes and drift away from this terrible reality- now, right now, so I'll never have to wake up here again.

But I can't sleep, no matter how hard I try, so instead I stare at the clock, watching the seconds tick away.

7:48 PM.

Five minutes left.

Deep breaths, deep breaths.

© 2011