We all thought this would be when time was hardest for us. We thought we would have too much time. And it feels to all of us as if it is going far too quickly. I believe this is because none of us wants this to be over. It is easier to be here, even if it is a little confusing.
There isn’t any talking it out, between you and me. I manage, you manage, and maybe that’s the best it can get. This sounds terrible to you, I bet. But it’s the pressure for more that’s eating you up. Think about it. What could I say that would make you feel better? You want me to say I abandoned you selfishly to pursue my own dreams and neglected you?
I wanted to go to space more than I wanted to be your mother.
That’s true. If you had ever been to space, you’d understand.
It’s not true. They are different things. Nothing is comparable to another thing.
If it walks like a duck, but talks like something else, is it still a duck? Is it a bad duck? Does it have to be a bad duck? Can’t it be another creature altogether?
We shall go on and on, you and I.
You will continue to blame me for leaving you, and I will continue to leave you.
The last thing I want to say is that I feel I have lived a whole life on this mission and I want to do it all over, but do it much better. The strange thing is, I may have the opportunity to do just that.
But I won’t have that opportunity with you.
I don’t know what to do.
You could accept that I’m another mother altogether, and that we have a love that is only ours and so that’s why it doesn’t look like any other kind of love but it’s not a bad love. We could destroy the world and make a new one.
What can I give you of myself? I need to find something of me that I can give you, that is also something you want.
SERGEI
My darling boy, Dmitri,
I dream all the time of going outside. I don’t mean outside on Earth, with the trees and the sky and the grass and the air and the cool lakes. I mean space. Yesterday I performed a simulated EVA. At no time did I imagine myself to be truly in space. So I will still dream.
Prime is talking about adding more scents to the exercise simulations. When we are snowshoeing in a pine forest, for example, there will be scent of pine. Also, being able to add scent to the air of our Hab might make us more happy.
Oh, simulations they can do almost everything. All feelings, pretty much, these can be made. But they cannot tell you what to think.
Simulation can say, “I want you to be running along cliffs of Dover in Yoshi’s exercise simulation and get healthy dose of biophiliac happiness, sense of communion with nature, and freedom from confinement in small spacecraft.” Simulation cannot say, “And all of a sudden in the middle of this you will remember how your son Dmitri picked up a little frosted cake when he was one year old and went to put it in his mouth but instead smashed it right into his eye.”
I think you were worried that I should be lonely here, and have no one to talk to. I said that I would talk to my friends, and we do talk. I speak with Mission Control, I write to my friends on Earth or make videos. You and I exchange these letters, and soon we will be back close enough to speak in real time. All of this is an immense silence with words on top of it. You were right about that.
The world is very colorful and crowded, but really, behind it all, is emptiness.
Ilya will not have told you. He is a funny boy. By his codes, as I understand them, he will not have said to you: “Papa knows that you are gay. We talked about it.” I asked him to keep an eye on you, to make sure that you don’t do something stupid in order to hide it, or because you are ashamed. He’s waiting for you to say it to him, but he knows that you might not.
I do know.
Maybe you will laugh, but I have this hope that your being gay is a sign that you are not as much like me as I fear.
I like to do very hard things, but this should not be a thing I am proud of, because it is more than liking a challenge. I like to do very hard things because then I know that I am not what my father said I was, which was a meek boy who was afraid. And because he was not so wrong, my father. I was afraid. I was timid, I didn’t want to do many things. I forced myself, over and over.
It was shameful, to meet so many other people in my life, in my work, all people who loved doing hard and maybe scary thing. That is what they wanted. I didn’t want to do it, I wanted to have done it. You see this difference? I see it, and so often I dislike myself. I wish to be so much better than I am, to change totally my nature.
Possibly I dislike myself because my father disliked me. The psychologist would say: “Oh, he did not hate you—he hated himself.” I will go so far as to say that it is a possibility he hated both of us.
Possibly I dislike myself because I think doing so makes me a better man. No. I know that it has made me a better man.
When I was your age, I used to hit myself. I would strike my own thigh, with my fist. It is absurd to think of now, and I cannot totally remember the circumstances under which I performed this. I was restless, and unhappy. I remember becoming even more enraged, at my inability to hit myself hard enough. There is a tradition in religion of this kind of practice, and as a boy I admired it, although I never struck myself for God.
Whenever I see people do bad things in the world because they are frightened, I think they are someone like me, who has not forced himself to be better.