Space is not a particularly interesting place to be.
It seems like it would be, given how excited people seem to get whenever you mention it, and the great honor and privilege it's considered to walk on the moon, an equally uninteresting place which, in terms of space, is like walking to the post office just down the street; it's so damn close to earth. As mentioned, it's about as exciting as the post office too. It's just a dusty, dull grey ball. If it was anywhere on earth, it'd probably be turned into an amusement park or something, or someone would whack a couple of office blocks in the middle and be done with it. But because it's in space, it's 'cool' and 'alien' and 'weird'.
My imagination can come up with better moons.
Anyway, all the photos we see of space make it out to be an amazing place, filled with violent supernovas which scatter the building blocks of creation across the sky; nebulas breathing life into stars; dazzling displays of light formed from clouds and clumps of matter collapsing in on themselves; and planets with little green men (and women, I suppose, otherwise they'd die out really quickly) looping around fiery suns. In reality, it's nothing like that. There's no doubt all those things are out there, and they are as beautiful, as everyone says, but the universe is so big, they're just randomly dotted around, far apart from each other, so you'll be lucky if you see one, and if you do, you'll drift a long way before you see another.
Mostly, the universe is dark, cold, and very dull.
It was just my luck to end up drifting through it infinitely.
At least I had a friend.
I glanced up at her, nuzzling into the warmth of my clothes as I listened to the faint hiss of her earphones, the only sound in the deathly silence around us. It seemed that screams were the only thing you couldn't hear in space – earphones fizzling with music and the ticking noise of an iPod were just fine, apparently.
She noticed my movement out of the corner of her eye and met my gaze, pulling out one of her earphones, letting it drift away from her ear.
"What's up? Are you bored?" she said, pulling on the ear of my hat playfully; as her own hat pinned down her wild red hair.
"There's nothing to look at." I complained. "Nothing to inspire us. It's just stars. One is nice, but 1022 to 1024 can get a little repetitive."
"Don't look at the stars, then." She said, closing her eyes and kicking back, like she was swimming through the sky. "Make better ones."
I heard her switch the song to Swan Lake as she caught hold of the other earphone, and held it out for me to take.
I took it and put it in my ear, allowing the soft melody to make my eyes slip shut as I created another space, a more interesting space, where stars flashed in time with the music and rainbows raced across the sky. I held my friend's hand and she squeezed it back, no doubt dreaming of a universe similar to mine, with purple skies streaked with black and clouds of red and purple strewn about far more abundantly than nebulas were now.
We could both get used to an eternity of dreaming of places that didn't exist. Thinking is more fun when the laws of physics stop telling you off about your crazy ideas.
"Lend me an earphone…"
"…and we'll float away together forever."