Now I watch the same blue-and-white marble spin beneath my boots, and I feel nothing. That’s the part they don’t tell you about in the recruitment brochures. Not the danger, not the radiation, not the bone atrophy. They don’t tell you that the most terrifying thing in the universe isn’t the vacuum or the cold or the endless dark. It’s the boredom.
There’s a spot on the station’s hull that I’ve passed a hundred times before. It’s a small scorch mark, about the size of my palm, where a micrometeoroid hit two years ago. I remember the night it happened. I was inside, drinking rehydrated coffee, when the whole station shuddered and alarms blared. We thought we were dead. Turned out to be a fleck of paint traveling eighteen thousand miles per hour. firstclass pov
Outside, the universe keeps spinning. The scorch mark keeps fading. And somewhere, three hundred miles down, my mother is doing a downward dog in what used to be my bedroom. Now I watch the same blue-and-white marble spin
And I am so tired of being first.