We’re just entering Saturn’s orbit when Lou tells me he wants a divorce.

Saturn has always been my favorite of the planets, though best admired from a distance. Up close the neat rings disintegrate and what looked beautiful from far away is actually just a mass of broken pieces—rocks and ice and dust trapped together, masquerading as a whole.

The scientists say they’re disappearing, the rings. We can’t trust anything to stay.

*

I know he must have someone on the crew.

This is not a fresh realization. We’ve simply been gone too long for him to still be harboring feelings for anyone back home. That’s just Lou: if a person isn’t right in front of him, they cease to exist. Life must be so easy his way, and so interesting. And if you’re lucky enough to exist for him, you might feel it too: the extraordinary and inimitable sensation of being the only one.

I’m no stranger to the feeling. I’m no idiot, either. The all-crew dinners remind me of how I felt when I first met him. Our team crowds the round white table, our freeze-dried feast. They use any excuse to catch the light coming off him for just a little bit longer. He shines and we glow.

*

Sometimes when I try to sleep I find myself engaging in fantasies of sabotage. The ease is part of the appeal. I’ve lived on this ship for eight years, and I know her intimately. I heal her when she’s broken; she’s mine. I know what damaged component would briefly hinder us, which one would unravel the whole mission, which would kill me, or kill him, or kill us all. Valves and wires and tiny gears. Mechanical parts projected against the backs of my eyelids, floating in space. Disconnected, begging to be touched.

*

There’s a bright young thing gazing out the window dreamily, her wispy bangs plastered to her forehead in a sheen of eager sweat. Everything’s still new for her up here. She’s closer to every star than she’s ever been. Every planet is another first time. She pulses just walking around the ship, slick and yearning, grinning, radiating.

I never wanted to go back, she whispers. Flush-faced, her hair red like a cartoon explosion—boom. The stars frame her through the window, a living work of art.

There’s nothing to go back to now, of course.  

*

Everyone on the crew is younger than me, except Lou. I never recognize the songs they play: melodies with artificial beats and robots singing backup for girls born in another century, voices that ring like clear golden bells. I learn the words but don’t join in the sing-alongs.

I am surrounded but lonely. I imagine myself out among the stars. I make lists about the best planets to be marooned on, distant Pluto and windswept Jupiter. My husband hasn’t looked me in the eye since leaving Saturn.

*

There are, after all, no divorce lawyers in space. No marriage therapists or mediators, no judges, no courts or contracts. Lou knows this. What there is: our single ship, on a futile and increasingly meaningless mission.

There are other things, too—bright stars and planets made of fire and ice and drifting, pointless asteroids and pretty little comets and meteors that will eventually burn up into nothing and voracious black holes.

There are living things and dead things. I make more lists. I never include myself.

*

The solar system is, in fact, changing. They sent us out to answer this question and the answer is yes and also they did not need to send us out in this ship or spend all of their money to put us here. We used to joke about what we could buy with just a single one of our suits, how many Hollywood mansions, New York lofts, college educations, vintage cars and yachts. On the clearest nights before we left Earth, I could look up and figure out for myself what they sent us to confirm—without a helmet, without a ship, feet still firmly planted in soil on a planet that no longer exists. I could see things I never used to be able to see, planets that shouldn’t have been near each other, or near us, telling a story. A story of what was coming, which we thought we could prevent.

And yet, when they asked to send us out, I had no reason to decline.

*

I still remember when we met: when I was a student and he was a teacher. It’s true that Lou has always been a teacher, always had that presence; he told me a story once about children crowding him on the playground, by the winding plastic slide, as he showed them a nugget of moonstone he’d conjured from the depths of his pockets. Transfixing even then, casting otherworldly spells, his hands in constant, blinding motion. How he could make you believe that everything you’d learned prior was utterly meaningless compared to what he was saying now, yet also that you were smart, special, and capable, that all of the accumulated knowledge and experience within you would amount to something incredible. You were gold, always had been; he had just scraped you clean so you could see it for yourself.

*

I’ve decided I won’t hold it against the bright young thing. She never had a chance, and it’s not her fault; I concede that it’s a little mine, but mostly his. I wonder if there was anything on Earth she’ll mourn. I picture a little white house and a little black cat that lounged in the window, waiting. Sometimes I give her the dreams I had when I was younger. When she talks to me I picture the beautiful, coiled-up nest of her brain. Throbbing pink, still growing, its soft shape yet undefined.

*

In the end, gravity is the thing I’ll miss most. It shows up on my final list: a book’s spine cracking my head as I reach for the top shelf at the library, the wet splat of an egg hitting ceramic tile, an apple gently loosing from the branch that grew it and sinking into the grass beneath, even when no one is around to hear. Knowing incontrovertibly that when you let go of something, it will fall away from you.

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