8 hours in and I’ve gained enough understanding to remain sane. I understand how to tread, where to place my feet, and to keep my eyes shut so tight that not even the backs of my eyelids can light up the feathery veins from the shining of the atmosphere.
Initially I was delighted to discover it was breathable with gravity and oxygen shockingly similar to that of Earth. I couldn’t understand why it was barren if it seemed so livable. I understand now. Nearly understand. After walking on this supposedly abandoned planet for 483 minutes, I understand just barely enough to know that nobody should ever venture here again.
However, each step away from my ship in my blind trek means that it becomes less likely I’ll make it back and others will never learn what I have, and more will come.
So I walk, keeping up an imaginary rhythm so asymmetrical that I sweat just trying to maintain it. Right foot lifted PAUSE hover hover inch forward PAUSE step down slide left foot raiise and raise and raise until PAUSE no hover just drop but don’t stomp NOW hover. Doing it like this does something, though I’m still not entirely sure what. I’m not sure if the pace makes it difficult for them to follow me, or if the sporadic sounds and silences drown out the sensation of
being crowded, a million times surrounded. Either way it is working, the only footsteps I hear are my own and that means I am safe.
Of course, while managing this miraculous walk, I need to be aware of the surface I am stumbling upon. Firm and rugged and bumpy and painful and real, I like that. That raw hurt is good, it is safe. I’m barefoot and I know the grey clay I stared at before learning to keep my eyes shut tight is like uncut diamonds, in firmness though not quite in shine. This means my feet are bleeding. I wonder if this is why they follow me. I like to think it is, because then at least the
bleeding can stop, either by scabbing, healing- or by me just…running out.
If the ground smooths out, or worse, my feet fall through liquid, I backpedal with more speed than my exhausted muscles could seemingly manage and search my aching feet around back to the safety of the jagged terrain. I’m better about avoiding it now, feeling it on toe tip and smelling it in the air.
The liquid is when I first saw them.
It’s fluid- but not quite, like starch and vapor and milk and mercury.
It dragged me down with its temperature so nonexistent it burned both hot and cold in the most excruciating way, it weighed like everything yet I moved freely enough to escape.
It tasted like pumpkin and smelled like a maternity ward.
But escaping it was worse I guess, because as I pulled myself out of the prismatic fluid,
my hand gripped a hand and my eyes met eyes.
And around those eyes I saw a million others exactly the same and the identical hands all reached out in synchronicity towards mine and my heart sank to my knees because those nails were chewed to the nub from anxiety and those eyes were lined pink with exhaustion with preorbital veins fractured to stars.
And I knew those hands and I knew those eyes because they were MINE.
So I shut them tight, hands to fists and eyes to crumpled paper and I ran. I learned running doesn’t help when a million identical footsteps thunder just behind and around all around- and my bones vibrate until I think they’ll disintegrate. In 8 hours I’ve learned how to step. Just step. Blindly reaching for something, any comfort, away from everything.