I remember the bars and the jokes, the stranger's eye caught once and never once again.
The world I knew grown distant and strange, seen through transmissions increasingly delayed.
I'd always wanted to try space travel.
I love this little snippet! I want more, of course. The thing I heard but did not read was the word "but" at the end. As in, "I'd always wanted to try space travel, but..." This is a character who is realizing for the first time what he is up against as his craft speeds away from those bars and strangers and toward whatever distant and lonely outpost s/he is bound for. It made me think about Al Worden, the Apollo astronaut who died recently. It seems to me that NASA was smart about how they used the guy who would remain in the command module while his two comrades went to the surface of the moon. The put Worden to work taking photographs of the moon, some of the best ever, and asked him to perform NASA'a first "deep space" EVA on the way back from the moon. But the part that always gets me about those Apollo guys is how they didn't go crazy despite being strapped into a tin can barely the size of a Corolla for 13 days! Well, that was the duration of the mission. Two of the three got some shore leave on the moon, but a guy like Worden was where he was for the duration. Makes you questions a few things in your life, just like the speaker in your story does. Great start!
I love this little snippet! I want more, of course. The thing I heard but did not read was the word "but" at the end. As in, "I'd always wanted to try space travel, but..." This is a character who is realizing for the first time what he is up against as his craft speeds away from those bars and strangers and toward whatever distant and lonely outpost s/he is bound for. It made me think about Al Worden, the Apollo astronaut who died recently. It seems to me that NASA was smart about how they used the guy who would remain in the command module while his two comrades went to the surface of the moon. The put Worden to work taking photographs of the moon, some of the best ever, and asked him to perform NASA'a first "deep space" EVA on the way back from the moon. But the part that always gets me about those Apollo guys is how they didn't go crazy despite being strapped into a tin can barely the size of a Corolla for 13 days! Well, that was the duration of the mission. Two of the three got some shore leave on the moon, but a guy like Worden was where he was for the duration. Makes you questions a few things in your life, just like the speaker in your story does. Great start!
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