1 - 20 of 55 Bookmarks
Navigation
List of Bookmarks
-
Tags
Summary
The sun is dying. They built a whole spaceship around a bomb and gave it to Hyunwoo and gave him a crew and said: you’re our last chance, if you don’t make it it all ends.
(What they don't want you to know is this: everything ends).
-
Bookmark Notes:
I’m in awe…saving this for a rainy day because this was gorgeous. So poetic!! Very existential!!
-
Bookmark Notes:
}
One of the first things they teach you while preparing you for long-term space travel is this: do not watch the Earth disappear behind you.
There’s a scientific name for it. After all those astronauts that went up and came back down, as all things are want to do, they put it in books and manuals and taught it. Hyunwoo’s professor explains it to them as the overview effect.
“It shifts your whole view of your life, the way you see the world,” he says, “a switch goes off in your brain and it makes you realize.”
They don’t want you starting out a two year trip to the Sun by flipping that switch. They don’t want you look at Earth from it’s orbit and realize that below you is every single human life that has ever been lived. They don’t want you to look and realize we’re floating in a void and anything could knock us off our axis. They don’t want you to look and realize how fragile your entire existence up to this point has been.
They want to tell you space travel is what’s scary. Everything in space is just waiting to kill you. But that’s the funny thing, isn’t it? That Earth is just there, stuck in space, and it’s just a lucky set of circumstances that has kept space from killing you in your own home.
}
Hyunwoo sometimes wonders what’s worse: to never know of every summer you missed, or to remember and feel the absence of summer all around you.
}
Out of the corner of the light, Hyunwoo watches sunlight cast shapes onto Kihyun’s face and wonders if he’d find the same shapes on Kihyun’s face if they were on Earth.
}
Hyunwoo entertains the idea of being in love with Kihyun.
He thinks he could be.
But this is space, this is miles away from Earth. This is miles away from anyone else Hyunwoo could love instead. This is different. Maybe on Earth, with real gravity and with so many people he hasn’t met yet, Hyunwoo does not love Kihyun. But Hyungwon said that Hyunwoo would be the same once they got back to Earth. Which means he does.