Endosymbiosis

20. Endorphin

I couldn't help but think about what she had told me... Apparently, I wasn't the only one who had suffered losses; and, at that moment, "Donecea" had sounded too far away, when we were so close... So much closer than I should have allowed myself to be... Damn. I had turned away from humanity for a reason; but now it was starting to look like a weakness.

We were silent until sunset turned to night, because the fading of light was not a spectacle that could be interrupted. Her eyes, drowning in the stars, were the only thing I was willing to turn mine to face, because her curiosity was a spectacle that I couldn't miss. I still didn't quite know what she planned to do when she got to the core, but I'd seen a side of her that couldn't have been easy to show.

"The worst thing you can do is take things for granted..." I broke the silence softly, thinking of everything I once thought I would have forever and no longer had. "Some things... Slip very easily through the fingers..."

I took a handful of that glistening powder that collected on my clothes and watched it vanish by the wind so I couldn't hold it. How many things had I lost like that? I was tired of counting.

"Your father?" She whispered. "He must have been a great man..."

"The greater he could..."

"Was he the one who showed you the universe beyond Earth?" She asked and I nodded, revealing a little of my past:

When I was a kid and found out that my father dealt with aliens, I spent months asking him to take me to meet one. I should have been terrified... But I was too young to be afraid.

"10 years is too young to get out of the atmosphere!" I remember my mother complaining. "And with those beasts you deal with... It's too dangerous!"

"This customer is different." My father replied. "He cares about more than crushing us... It's more than we can say for most humans."

"Are you making friends with aliens now?" She was so worried... But maybe I should have listened to her."

"Friendships are good for business."

That day I stepped onto his ship for the first time... It was very different from today... Cleaner, shinier, and some walls were in different places, yet I tried to rebuild it so many times in the image of the perfection he created. The open doors were like the entire universe was opening up for me; and when the Hasta pierced space sharp as a spear, I believed it was possible to break through without the price being immeasurable.

My father took off beyond Earth's limits, and as I lost myself in the vastness behind the window, he opened the doors to a space creature. I hid behind his leg as if he were an unstoppable wall... For me, my father was not just a man trying to build his life by stumbling, but the ground on which my reality stood; he was where I dipped my roots for my head to search for the sun; he was my safe haven to return, the solution to any problem and protection from any threat... With him, there was no death to worry about or dream that couldn't come true, and when I hid behind his leg at the moment the alien emerged from the darkness, I was sure everything would be okay forever.

The creature deciphered itself under the dim light of a lamp, his three eyes watching us with the cruel voracity of hungry beasts. His bones poked out from beneath blood-reddened skin, his gigantic body curved to fit into the tight space, and his teeth were so sharp I remember thinking they'd been sharpened, because nothing I'd ever seen on Earth looked so destructive, beyond what was created for destruction.

"Already taking you to space adventures?" The creature asked with a crooked smile, in a language I didn't know at the time. His words appeared translated for me on the screen of a device my father had given me earlier, and just like that, I was able to follow the conversation.