“Everything you will need will be in this box…”
When you first go into space it is the most desolate and strangely beautiful thing you’ll ever see. There are vast tracts of inky emptiness, pin pricks of light shimmering in the infinite distance but every so often you see something wonderful that sears itself into your consciousness forever.
Now, I can’t even bring myself to look out of the window at the gaudy lights and boiling gas of the nebula beyond the station: it looks fake, like a bad holo-show. The medical centre is a vast, cold tundra of healing. All the staff are methodical and pleasant enough yet at the same time brash and thoughtlessly noisy. My room is a painfully clinical, porcelain white cell with sharp edged lighting. Even the bed sheets feel hard and unforgiving, scratching against my survivor’s guilt at each slow turn of my tired body.