No one tells you how dry it is up here. The food and the air and even the water somehow. The water's actually not so bad. It's just that there's never enough of it for all the exercise I know I should be doing lest my bones and flesh turn into jelly. And you know where we get the water from. In solitary space, we are our own oasis.

For how dry the air is, it's drier when there is none. No oxygen no hint of no component of h2o just the baking rays or the drying freeze whichever way the cosmic inhospitability goes. It still kills the water. I miss home, by the water. I miss the air and the people and the water that they carried with them. I miss the sweet warm rain and the tears shed over things that seem so stupid now that everything fails, dryly crunches, leaves beneath teeth. I miss plants and the way sap smelled and the way blades of grass screamed and the flowers that turned to face the sun, like me, looking at the sky like me, growing skyward but tethered by their stalks. The only green here is an inky mix of mostly cyan cut with a bit of sickly yellow or sometimes if I'm lucky a mushy sprout or two in these irrational rations. The food is terrible. They expect us to keep active on this steady stream of counted-down nutrients but I can't even keep it down my body rejects it like Mother Earth rejected all us up here spat us up like a mother bird out into space couldn't stand to keep us on the dirt anymore. It was our own aspiration that sent us ad astra from the disaster nest. But now all we have is this one lone room one lone oasis, myself, my own worst water source.

We. I wasn't supposed to be alone. Someone was supposed to be here with me but now it's just me and the ghost of someone I've never met. I talk to them sometimes and they say nothing back. Nothing back yet. When I break—when my despondent water breaks—when black glass bursts before fire—when I go from simply sick to insane, give birth to beings beyond the fuzzy shadows I jump at, become a new oasis. When I bloom. It'll be a party. When. Delusions are my final hope because if I open that door all the carefully conserved and reclaimed water will just come flooding out in a sludgy puddle and I'll die and they'll hate me. I must stink there's not enough water for a shower and I miss home when I could be clean there's not even enough water to dampen a washcloth and rid my nose of the crystal remnants of sick. Throwing up in zero gravity is no fun. No matter how hard you try it comes out your nose more than your mouth and noses, suffice to say, were not meant to process food one way or the other. It's hard to breathe for the parching crumbs. The snot amazes me it's like crying but who said my nose could hog so much water? It's as hot and dry as snot may be. Like my guts are metal and this is just the smeared grease keeping the gears running. falteringly, running...

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If my organs didn't fail me I'd think I were a body without them. Some punished probe, sick subject of a Russian novel or sleep experiment or spacecraft. Hark! Call me Laika. The stars are my domain. She barked from my window the other day. I forgot I had a window; I forgot there was an outside to see. It's nice but the light is far too ardent. I miss home. The light was like that too in the day but if I slept past the worst of it like a jerboa or some desert toad the sun would set in soft purple and soft light. It should go without saying the sun never sets up here. Or maybe it's always set; I can always see the stars. I can always see all the stars, the sun has no mask of mythic proximity to hide behind. The sun here is just another star even though it's closer, my one and only sole solar solace salience sick sad sanity binds me...

The only other bodies I can see are 1) my own functionally hollow thoracic massive ribcage like a birds I can't wait for it to atrophy so I don't feel so full of nothing. and 2) the rusted globe below. You always heard about the planet dying and saw pictures from space of this verdant bluegreen spinning thing, our spaceship, and you felt love and hope. That's bullshit, they're all old photographs, our cosmic body is falling apart and we'll all die accomplishing nothing more prominent than the worse world we're leaving for the next generation. But what can I do from up here? This is supposed to be Heaven or The Heavens and I've never been religious but I feel most powerless in when writ in isolation, in solitude by the sun, in this record no one will read, in this room in space. Being one's own oasis is useless. An oasis is its flowers, its plants, its trees and their shade and the greenery in the desert but my cosmic body is just as dry as the sun or the rusted Earth with the water I miss. I cannot spare a single tear for a traveler's canteen; I cannot even cry for myself or the concept of flowers. Mine eyes remain; black glass dry as the outside.