When I Fall

2011-07-26T15:35:00.000-04:00

Sometimes, life takes a course you didn't anticipate. You're thrown against the sides while it careers around the track. You would do well to remember that. If I had, maybe I wouldn't be here: stuck in a tiny box filled with pipes and pumps and cables, falling endlessly around some bloated hypergiant. Which just happens to provide my only real entertainment, when I'm not dictating into this thing.

Not much entertainment, mind you. Not really. The cloud deck swirling below me is a startling array of tans and beiges. More than I thought possible for such a boring color. Occasionally I'll see a thin band of rust between the wider stripes of browns. Little curlicues swirl where the bands meet. Causing the subtly different colors to drift into neighboring latitudes. But never mixing. Just dissipating, eventually.

Occasionally a moon will make its appearance, either tracking across the face of the planet below, or streaking across the sky above. The ones above me barely show a disc. Below, I can see two small satellites passing in their orbits. One, a fat spherical body, though it is probably smaller than Io. The other, even lower, seemingly skimming the clouds, looks to be an irregular chunk of ice.

johnburroway

When I Fall