Day 27. Each day, I am slipping further down a muddy slope of civility, trading pride and dignity for the comforts of my feral mind. Today, I am having entire conversations with myself, out loud about my boogers and what I can learn from them. It’s liberating, like wearing pajamas to Super Savers, but I fear that this isolation will render me bizzare past the point of redomestication.
In training, they drilled into us the importance of routine, so every hour I check the one little window. Still nothing out there: just a sky, and a flat plain of regolith ground, and the line called the horizon that connects the two as if it were drawn in dull pencil. Bleak, empty, nothingness. A nothingness that has exceeded my expectations in it’s lack. A nothingness that, upon first glance, can leave one in awe of it’s immensity, such that you want to scream, but if you open your mouth to the vacuum, no sound would come out, but I am getting used to it.
Inside my habitat, it is just as still as it is outside. Nothing moves unexpectedly, although I keep hallucinating a fly that zips across the room in the corner of my eye. I have named my hallucinatory fly Vinny and I sing to him sometimes...well, often. I have fallen in love with Vinny as he is the only thing that surprises me since I got here and set up camp. He’s always flickering around, flirting with my attention. He knows I like it.
My habitat is simple and functional. I have everything one might need in a normal apartment back home: a couch, a desk, a bed, a refrigerator and basic supplies. My t-shirts are all different colors, which is intended to lift my morale. Just to spice things up, I have taken to wrapping my hair with these colorful shirts. In the meantime, I am here on mission: to collect data, make observations, and most of all to survive as living proof that a human can last this long out here without contact.
I constantly crave auditory rhythm: a bouncing ball, footsteps, a car engine...occasionally, my mind skims the memory of rain, but I have avoided it. I am too tender to the notion of rain, and if I think about it too much I am overcome with an uneasy, dual feeling of expansive joy and dreadful sorrow...thinking of its complicated combination of rhythm and chaos, the pin prick sensation of its droplets darting across my skin, the way it succumbs to gravity so fearlessly…nothing makes me feel more at home, and then instantly so far from home.
It has been 27 days of isolation, and I am starting to wonder if I will ever be able to operate as a functional member of society if I were to make it home. Who, on Earth, would ever relate to me again? I have taken proactive steps to evade these fears. For example, at night, I sometimes practice dinner parties. I start with some hors d'oeuvres, making light conversation with myself about the fabric of my pillow or the sensation of the floor under my feet based on how I disperse my weight. Then, I move to the table and open the conversation by presenting a topic or question. I get up and change seats, and as if I were a different person, look at my once-occupied chair and respond. I move around the kitchen, sharing different perspectives and ideas. We discuss books, or memories, or ideas. Vinny often joins, a delightful distraction from the conversation.
The silence and stillness of this place has made my thoughts feel bigger and louder than ever. I can no longer blame the outside world for the way that I feel. Back home, I could project my feelings on things like deadlines and traffic. Here, if I have an angry day, it is me who creates that anger. When I have an unproductive day, that is me. When the day feels long, that is also me. Melancholy: me. Charming: me. Empty: me. Beautiful: me. There is nowhere to run.
Today is day 27. The medics deemed it safe for me to leave the habitat once every 27 days. Today, for the first time, I will go outside.
I will suit up, putting on my boots last. I will take a deep breath, make sure everything is working. I will enter the decontamination chamber, and await the automated countdown to conclude. The chamber pressure will reach the Martian standard: 6.71 millibars. I will detach the umbilical cable connected to my suit, breach the outer hatch, and step outside.
There will be no one and nothing outside as far as the eye can see. Nothing, aside from me and my little habitat, but I have a plan: the void will be a perfect opportunity for me to paint the scene with my imagination! I will bring all of the colors I can imagine: peacock blue, kitty cat paw pink, ruby red, picasso blues, and ireland grass green, eye pupil-black, the color of snow, of roses, and the yellow in the tie dye shirt I wore as a kid.
This painting will surround me, and man, will it move! My pallet of rhythms will include: rhythms of dancers and tennis games, water dripping from a faucet, my grandmother stirring a bowl of batter, waves crashing in sets, a cow chewing on grass, the arrival of a subway, the ticking of clocks.
All of these things that I have carried in my mind all my life have become my paints. I will paint myself the most beautiful world and I will fill it with everyone I love and dream of loving, and the beauty and the pain will be so much to bear, and I will take it all in. And just before my hour is up, right before I must return for lack of oxygen, I will look up, through the tall trees of my imagination, through the sunlight, past the birds flying across the periwinkle sky, and I will paint myself some clouds. Dark, dancing, swollen, heavy, rain clouds, hanging low and close. I will paint them full and filling, and just before I go inside, I will let it rain.
©2020 by Shelsea Ochoa. All rights reserved.