Mars is a dream and Mark is sleeping and never wakes up.
Every kid wants it at some point. Looks straight up from the ground, crick in the neck and head swimming slightly as they spin, and stars spread in all directions high above them, cascaded onto the deep darkness that opens up all around. Something in them yearn for it, wishes to merge with it and cease to be the one alone, but be one among the whole.
Most people stop, when they grow up and other things take the place of the yearning, when imagination comes to a glaring halt and grows less and less every month. Space is a dream and you need to stay wide awake not to miss anything in this day and age, insomnia is praised and considered good.
Some don't, though, their necks always aching and their heads always spinning and space is so far above but they look and look and look and sometimes it scares them but most always it beckons them and the ground beneath their feet is a tether they want shed like a snake sheds its skin.
Some even manages it.
Some get to take off and leave Earth's space of immediate influence and make the space in between stars not just a dream but a reality, even if the stars themselves still are oh so far out of reach.
Mark cries when he learns he'll be one of them. Big wet tears that stream out down his cheeks and onto the paper that he holds in his hands – remember your roots you'll want evidence for some things – and leaves dark evidence of their existence but he laughs as he does and at night he'll go outside of the city where the ground lights don't reach and he'll look up and raise his hands and the distance won't be as far as it was yesterday.
Everything is a whirlwind from there, the arrival back to NASA and the meeting of the team that'll be the only people with him looking down and not up. Six people who wants as he wants and cried as they learned and has the dream itching beneath their skin.
And then they're there, all the preparations behind them and the rocket that'll take them up rising up through the ground before them, and the countdown is ticking down down down and the zero has the Earth disappearing beneath them and the shift from full on Earth air to vacuum is breathtaking, stealing Mark's heart right along with everything else.
The hours that Mark doesn't spend doing his work or maintaining his body he spends by a window, not getting a crick in his neck because space is not just above but all around, the glass cold against his hands and his breath saying Mark was here where it hits right on.
The rest of the crew understands and walks right past where he stands, no hands touching and breaking him out from where space has him in its clutches. They all do it, after all. It's what brought them here all the way from back before.
And it takes forever and not long enough to reach Mars and start spinning round and round and strapping down yet again to make their home on the planet that is not where they started, setting up camp and collecting ground and see a horizon that isn't mostly blue but red and falling asleep on Mars is like a dream within a dream and Mark brings out the spinning top when he wakes up and doesn't know what he expects.
Mark wants to do everything, goes a little crazy, itches to take the rover and just drive, see how far he can go chasing the sun. He wants to take a shovel and just dig, see what lies meters beneath the surface, not just on paper but in actual goddamn dirt. He wants to carry it with him inside where there is air, smell it and dig his hands in until it gets stuck under his nail and he want to feel it under his bare feet as he walks.
They're on Mars, he wants to do everything, and the days are counting down too fast to.
And then the storm hits, Mars throwing them a surprise party they wanted to watch from afar but crashed into their living room and wouldn't leave them alone and they're outside can't see the stars above them and they have to leave right now and the wind blows so hard it wants to take them with it and the MAV is right in front of them and some of them even manages to reach it but the storm wants too much and Mark's suit give to the metal and the MAV is as far away as the nearest star and the ground is his tether as he slams down all too far away in the red sand and there is no going back from this as unconsciousness drags him under and keeps him there.
And the others leave, travels out into the dark night, strapped into their seats and not able to look back, only able to look forward, look home, to waking hour.
Mark wakes up millennia later, heart in his throat and his life leaking out of him in a red not brown enough for this planet.
The spinning top is nowhere to be found.