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A quote: “I always like to look on the optimistic side of life, but I am realistic enough to know that life is a complex matter.” ~~ Walt Disney
I’ll start with a story …
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The unfamiliar clock on the nightstand read 11:30pm. The bottle of Tequila was two-thirds empty, and he still couldn’t sleep. He stared up at the hotel room ceiling, letting memories roll through, still lonely that the left side of the bed was empty.
A week of the same evenings and wondering how she felt waking up in the night with her own memories.
They had been an improbable couple. He remembered Josh saying that after he spotted her across the room. Improbable. Him — ponytailed, frayed jeans, guitar-callused fingers and chasing music-flavored dreams. Her — buttoned-down, upswept hair, practical professionalism. Surrounded by girlfriends who looked at him with narrowed eyes as he led her to the dance floor.
None of them understood how they completed each other. She gave him purpose, he gave her permission. There had been lots of unfamiliar ceilings, but they saw them (or were too busy to notice) together.
Earlier today, she looked up to find him as her ceiling. He looked into her eyes, wanting every single moment of their 49 years together to live all over again.
And when her eyes closed and the machines were turned off, he left her in her last room to find a bottle of Tequila and an improbable future without her.
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Now, it’s your turn.
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. featured image, cropped, Adobe Stock standard license
Cameron says: The clock just struck midnight and I’m sitting with a glass of wine in my hand as I look out on the city. It’s the nicest penthouse in the area of course. I could have bought it years ago but I didn’t have the connections or the numerous shell companies to hide the money. I’ve lived long enough in this business to be a rumor. A real life Keyser Söze if you will (I love that movie by the way.).
But things are about to come to an end. It started with one arrest that led to several others. I don’t bother ordering the killings of the people while they are in prison. But I can see the pattern which makes me one of the rare ones in this business. People who get this far usually think they are untouchable until the cops grab them.
I’ve already shifted my funds to the alternate account. The identity on my passport has been built over the years and the average background check will reveal a boring real estate investor. I have a place to flee to and can live out my life in obscurity.
But I am going to miss this view.
I don’t know why I took a picture that night. It was just a hotel room, even if it was one of the big names, a tower with floor to ceiling windows in their sleeping rooms. Personally, I would’ve preferred blackout curtains on the last place on Earth I’d ever spend the night — but I have to acknowledge that the view of the full moon was captivating. One last look at Luna where Pete Conrad laughed and joked, where Alan Shepard whacked golf balls, where Gene Cernan ad-libbed an old Tin Pan Alley song.
This world has dozens of moons, but we can’t see any of them from the gas-mining base just under the first level of clouds. I did see a few of them from the station, when I first arrived out here, but I’m no astronomer, so I probably saw more and didn’t know the difference between tiny potato moons, the other planets of the system, and distant stars.
Most of the time I stay in the lab with the other chemists, making sure we’re getting the fractions we need and sending them up the right pipes. Helium-3 is one of our biggest exports, but there are some other weird gasses we’re gathering from the lower levels, organic stuff that suggests there’s some kind of really weird unicellular life down there. Something with a completely different biochemistry than anything in the Chongu Empire. I’ve even heard whispers about the Old Galactics, and leftovers from ecologies completely wiped out by the omnicidal war that destroyed their civilizations back in the days when Dimetrodon still ruled the Earth.
Here my “bedroom” looks more like one of those Japanese capsule hotels. Just enough to stretch out and a tiny locker for my gear. At least the Kitties understand that humans don’t curl up like they do, so it’s manageable. But I’ll be glad when I wind up my contract out here and can get back to civilization.
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