I hope You Sleep

II

There had never been much reason to give any thought to the idea of nothingness before. Now, I found its implications were profound. Nowhere to go, no one to speak with, nothing to expect, nothing to hope for... emptiness filled every inch of me. I was bursting with nothing and it weighed more than stone.

For a while I wished I would crash. Fall into a black hole or end up in the molten red core of a behemoth yellow sun. But thinking back to Mrs. Summers' class, I realized that as fast as I was moving, I would never catch up to the lights in the distance. I would never crash into anything at all. I would be doomed to watch as the stars burned on, always out of reach, my longing to be with them unrequited.

I wasn't a hero, and so hadn't earned a hero's death. For all my white-knight fantasies, the only person I had managed to save was myself. I would have no great ending. No fire, no glory, only the drifting lights ahead, the swirling cosmos beneath, and the darkness between.

And so I decided to sleep, to bring myself back to boyhood, back to that classroom where I watched the impossibly bright light of the early morning sun creep along Mrs. Summer's maple wood desk every morning, back to chasing the girls at recess. I would go back to a time before my heart had been broken, a time of innocence, of youthful ignorance.

Before I was to sleep, I wanted to leave something behind. Something of me, just in case there was another man in a similar flying machine coming from the other side. I sat at the monitor which I hadn't touched in years and waited for a thought to strike me. Some wisdom from the last living man... when nothing came, I simply hit the button hoping inspiration would show its head before I gave up entirely. The screen slowly burned awake, the digital blue lagged as the cold instruments struggled to push off the sleep from cold steel gears.

I scrolled through the options until I reached the ship's log. An entry had already been marked. Something had already been recorded. It was dated five years before I woke up. A single letter stood beside the date; S, for Samantha.