You Come Back, But You're Never the Same
A meditation on playing in zero-gravity.
You will soon feel sick. Awed and humbled, you unburden yourself from your safety harness. You see the Earth, a rock that is home to all you’ve known and loved, hundreds of miles below. Staring at it, through the window of the International Space Station—a craft that is orbiting the earth at 17,500 mph as it travels, what? west?—you turn and find that all of you, really all of you, limbs, heart, lungs, and hair, is floating. You wiggle your toes.
Suddenly, your body is everywhere in the room. The pit of your stomach recalls a feeling from decades before, screaming down a country road in your uncle’s old pickup, hitting a rolling bump and lifting off. Only now you never come back down. The feeling in your gut never goes away.
