Jovenan - The Diary of Your Dead Lover

[Jovenan]

Day 2

I’ve decided to start keeping a diary. I don’t mean a log. Those I’ve been diligently dictating ever since as a young cadet I discovered within me the desire to feast on that self-indulgent grandeur of pretending to be a real officer.

I mean a real diary. On paper. Quaint, I admit, but this felt like the right moment to start looking back now that there’s nothing ahead. Not that there’s much to see in any direction.

It’s been two days now since the wormhole collapsed on us. I won’t bother you with the details; I’m sure you’ve heard it from the news a thousand times since then. Not that I’d dare to think we ever made it to the news. Not the front page at least, where no space is spared by men with large titles and even larger egos. But I like to think that you would care of me enough to find me buried on the last page, in fine print.

Anyways.

What the news might have omitted is that we’ve continued to survive. Shockers.

Our shortcut through the folded paper of the cosmos wasn’t poking through quite as firmly as we had hoped for. That much is obvious if you’ve indeed been reading the news. But not only was the foundation rotten; our destination has remained unfound.

We don’t know where we are.

The stars behind our viewports are alien, the gravitational waves make no sense. The Science Department is at the verge of a civil war over whether we've travelled to another galaxy or another universe. We’re the first people in this corner of the universe, or the last.

I don’t know which one I prefer.

 

Day 3

I just reread my first entry. That’s one benefit of an old-school diary. When was the last time you listened to your old log entries?

I realised that I had addressed it to you, but I never defined who’s you. I don’t know for certain. I’d like to think it’s you.

I don’t know what to call you by except “you”. In my mind, we were past being “friends” and “roommates”, but we weren’t so far as to call you by the titles of “sweetest” or “my love”, I suppose. Now that we might never meet again, I don’t see why to restrain myself. For now, you only ever live in my mind, a phantom that loses its form should I let it go unfed by my undivided attention.

So, my love, forgive me for I will die of embarrassment on your footsteps should I return to you before a week has passed. Almost makes me wish we didn’t come home at all.

 

Day 5

Please ignore the previous entry. It’s cringy.

 

Day 8

After staying in guard for days, we’ve abandoned the closed gate and set out to the wilderness.

The stars are different here. I used to lie down with you at the meadows behind your parents’ home – do you still remember? – and between us, we could name all the stars and the constellations. Here I cannot, but that’s not all. No, they’ve also grown thinner here. We don’t have the familiar swarm of glow-worms dotting the everlasting field of darkness, but rather singular specks scattered across the empty sky.

A few days ago, we departed from the place the wormhole left us. Some of us still hoped it might reappear and we could ride it all the way back home. But every hour spent staring at the cold, unresponsive countenance to open its mouth and say, “go home”, we lose an hour that could have been dedicated to our own, still beating hearts.

The closest stars are light years away, but they are lifeless ones. We picked one that might not be so, more than a week’s journey away, and are headed there, hoping to rest before setting sails to the unknown until the familiar shores appeared.

It was the Captain who made the decision, of course. Not everyone agreed. There is no evidence the wormhole will re-emerge, but there is for that we will starve if we can’t power our engines, be it steel or flesh.

I hope the planet has spices. We try to avoid using replicators for anything unnecessary for now, and our tastebuds are considered secondary in importance. I might consider a mutiny by the end of the week. Hope you can still love a pirate.

 

Day 13

We are more lost than we had hoped for.

The M class planet we were heading for turned out to be dead. There’s no lush forests nor oceans full of fish as we were promised. No, they’re all gone. Nothing besides remains but sand and trunkless legs of stone.

I’m beginning to regret things. Listening to my father’s stories of explorers of the past, signing up for service, not losing an arm in the crash in the Academy. No, I don’t regret any of those things after all; you were with me in those hours, and I don’t regret you, my love.

We’re heading towards the next closest planet we believe could harbour us.

I wish there had been a sign over the wormhole. “Abandon all hope, ye who enter”. At least then I could blame my inability to read instructions.

 

Day 21

We just had our first death.

Sorry. Hi, nice writing you again. How’ve you been? Good? Crying thinking that I died weeks ago? Girl, me too.

One of our science officers died today. Or maybe yesterday, doesn’t matter, he had collapsed in the Stellar Cartography and nobody found him until today. The poor guy was a Kobliad, so he knew he wouldn’t need to make it to the end before getting a transfer to the God’s Air Force.

Lucky kid.

Sorry. I’m just so tired. I can’t be bothered writing any more purply today.

Due to his species, he was dependent on his rare drugs. He had paid for that deuridium, so he was going to use every last bit of it to work hard and skip partying while waiting to stare the bottom of the bottle. Admirable dedication, I guess, he really wanted to help us live through this endeavour.

He really cared about us. He was the only one.

At times like this, only the saints and the naïve remain loyal. I don’t know which one he was. I don’t even know which one I am, if either.

I hate the fact that I only now realised I referred to him as the “first death”.

 

Day 34

It’s half past four at night when I started writing this entry.

For hours, I’ve browsed my PADD in bed, because I’m afraid of stopping. Every time I close my eyes and try to sleep, my heart begins to race, it feels like something is scuttling before my eyes and ears, and my thoughts go past faster than I can follow them. I don’t know what I’m thinking of; the topics are ever-changing. I realised that I’m scared of being left alone with my thoughts.

Just a moment ago, I went to get some water. I leaned against the wall and the viewport; I looked out. I held my head, closed my eyes. I walked around my quarters, sometimes my eyes closed, sometimes fully open in the dark, and I held my hair, barefoot on the floor.

For a while, it felt like there was nothing outside these bulkheads. It’s been a month we’ve been here. Back then, I had a rhythm in my life, I accomplished things, I dreamed. Now I wake up, eat if at all, think that I should work, go to sleep. I try to talk to someone, play games, but I only end up staring at a lit screen for days. Days that have lost their meaning.

My handwriting is a mess, as if written by a maniac. Maybe it is.

But I write. It calms me down. Maybe because it’s the only way I can talk to you.

I pretend that I can still run my hands through your hair, smell them. I can still remember the smell, the twirls of rosemary and lavender, the beams of starlight and the flames of the moons. That’s what your hair smells like. I wish I could tell the computer to produce that smell for me, but it doesn’t understand. But I do.

I should go to sleep.

 

Day 55

I heard some goldshirts talking in the mess hall. Remember that Kobliad guy who died? They blamed him for where we are now. No one loved computer consoles so much to spend their last moments with one. They say he must have been feeling guilty. One of them even said he killed himself.

He’s not the only one who gets blamed. Our Captain has rarely left their quarters, they’ve been like this for weeks now. Nobody knows if they’re afraid of us or if they’re pretending nothing’s amiss. The helm officer on Day 0, her quarters turned out to be a complete mess. She says someone must have pillaged it to intimidate her, but the security records say no one but her had entered there the entire time. I saw her fingernails; they were all chipped and red. That’s not who she was.

People are slowly losing their minds. I know it. I know it, because I feel like if the guy hadn’t killed himself weeks ago, I might have done it to him myself. And I didn’t even know to blame him before today.

I’m afraid, love. Not of the devouring dead chasm that has forced us into its embrace, not the dimming lights behind the eyes of the people I used to know, but myself. It might have been a panic attack that one night I wrote you, but that’s what I feel all the time now. I’m in a constant state of panic, and I can’t smell your hair any more. The scent, it has faded in my mind.

I don’t know what I might do if I have to stay here.

 

Day 89

Something unusual happened today. I don’t know how to feel about it. Guilt, or delight? Regret, maybe even remorse. But for what happened, or for saying no?

I haven’t cut my hair since we found ourselves here. It hasn’t felt right to take up the ship’s lacking resources for something so vain. A fuzzy troll, that’s what I had imagined myself as whenever I left my abode under the bridge.

My hair always used to be short. Not a buzzcut like some former marine, but not something that could be braided and tied up either. You used to like my hair – shouldn’t have thought that, now I feel bad for letting it grow.

But someone liked the tousled birdnest on my head.

It was so bizarre at first. She said it was an improvement from the neat bob I used to have. That I looked less stiff, less intimidating. Vulnerable, approachable. I didn’t know if it was meant to be an insult, but she insisted she liked my new aesthetics.

She looked tired as well. We all are. Maybe that’s why she spoke to me. Exhausted to the point where blood is like filled with spirits. And like two drunk college girls first time in a bar, we complimented each other’s hair.

It felt good. To talk with someone, who appreciated me, who responded when I spoke!

And then I left.

She had asked me something. About our life when we would eventually reach an isle where to lower the anchor. Our life. Not my life, not her life, not our lives. Singular. She asked if I could consider having one.

I couldn’t. I told her so. I can’t begin a new life when I still have the old one to hold on to. I still have you. I can’t remember your smell, I can’t remember what your hair felt like between my fingers, but I can still remember you, the tender kisses that departed your lips to mine. I don’t remember what they felt like, what they tasted like, but I remember them. They were real.

And yet, she is somehow more real than you are to me. She doesn’t disappear if I stop thinking.

I’m sorry, my love. I won’t stop thinking.

 

Day 144

I’m covered in blood.

If you find droplets of dried blood on these pages, this is where they came from. My hands, my face, my uniform, all soaked in blood.

It’s not mine. Someone died today.

We had heard news of a potential M class planet, a few weeks' journey away. This one seemed real, like the previous four had not. Like grizzly bears in spring, people, feeble, broken people, emerged from their hideouts into the public. I saw the Captain the first time in weeks come out. This one felt real.

And then it happened.

It was three strikes through the chest. I saw it, it happened in the same room, although I didn’t stand by their side at the time. Everyone else fled. He struck once, then again, and lastly, he left it there. The handle of the knife poked out of the Captain’s uniform jacket as they lay on the floor on their stomach, in a pool of blood.

I told about it to her.

When I did, I realised I had come to help the Captain. I had, apparently, been the one to try and stop the bleeding with a medkit from the wall. That’s why my hands were red. I had tried to help.

And she hugged me. And I kept talking.

I hadn’t held the knife. I never had. But I know what he felt like before he landed the strikes. I had considered it many times. He didn’t want to leave his past life, still alive in his mind, like you’ve been living in mine. I felt guilty, even if I hadn’t done anything. I had, like him, kept my mind light years or maybe universes away, when my body lived in this world.

We kissed.

I allowed myself to go this far.

 

Day 233

We’ve started building a new home.

After months of sailing, we’ve landed at a calm cove. A planet, third from its sun, is slightly larger than where we lived together during that year-long summer. We dubbed it the Bird Home, like in the old myths, because it’s at the edge of the firmament arching over us, and here we flew to build our home.

Our ship descended from the orbit onto the planet’s surface to serve as the foundation for our community, and several houses already stand around it. It’s not capable of ascension any more; we are here to stay.

I’ve started building a house for myself. It’s made of a type of wood that I take from the trees that grow nearby. When heated, it acts like clay, so that I’ve shaped it to withstand heavy rain the village sometimes gets. Until it’s finished, I walk back to my quarters on the ship. I’m planning to farm some of the edible flowers we’ve found.

I keep writing “I” and “me”. That’s not correct, I just, I guess, didn’t want to write it to you in plain words.

It’s not “I”, but “us”. She’s here as well.

She was right. I can’t have you here with me. I remember so little of you any more. I don’t want to forget you, but every time I think of you, more of your features have been replaced by hers. I don’t see your eyes any more, I don’t even know what colour they are, unless they are sapphire like hers. I don’t hear your voice; you speak to me with hers.

I’m sorry. This is our home, but we are building a room, a guest room, in case you want to stop by.

 

Day 2584

I know it’s been years, but I was cleaning the house, and I found this diary. I had forgotten it, but I also thought you deserved to know what came of me. Of us.

Our youngest child, a daughter, is currently hiding under the skirt of my dress. She’s just two years old, and she’s shy about the neighbour’s young chan that helps us with daily chores during my pregnancy. I’m expecting our third child; the eldest is old enough to accompany his mothers to the fields on days when there’s no school.

Sometimes I think of you. I’d lie if I said I remembered what you looked like. You are not a person any more. You’re an idea.

When I think of you, I think of what I had. I suppose I had another life, full of people who I cared about and who cared about me, stress and joy, adventures. I still have some of those things. They’re just different.

I don’t know which is better. But only one idea comes home after a day at work, only one idea shares kisses with me when I cry. Only one idea is not just in my head.

I’m sorry, but an idea without a body is just a whisper in the wind, no matter how beautiful.

Goodbye, my love.