While in space, Lance realized that there were some things he knew about Earth that he didn't even knew he knew—let alone missed. So many little, everyday things that he forgot about. And some of them just astounded him—how now that they were all gone, he was able to identify what they were, even though until recently he hadn't even known they existed. He was so intimately familiar with them, but he hadn't ever recognized them, quite simply because he had never been without them in his life. Not for a second. And there were just so many. It was incredible.
For example—before leaving Earth, he hadn't known what gravity felt like. The way it made you want to slouch that little extra—something that he had memories of being chided for by his abuelita—and always gave you the feeling of having a gentle hand on your head, pressing you to the ground. But it somehow pushed from everywhere. It pulled on your insides and made them sit low in your belly. It sat on your forehead and gave you headaches. It was so close to you all the time. In space, the hand was gone. The air felt like it was pulling away. Everything was far away, and it made Lance want to grab everything close to him and squeeze it to his chest because it was going to float away unminded.
There was also no humidity. That was something he never thought he'd miss. When the air felt like it was stuffed full of cotton, and just walking around seemed to soak your shirt. When it managed to reach every molecule of your body and make you hot—that deep seated uncomfortable hot where you can't even remember what it feels like to be cold. And even when it wasn't like that—even when it was just a lack of dryness. He never noticed that the air rarely seemed to be dry in Cuba. There was no such thing as dry air when they lived so close to the ocean. He used to hate it, but now he missed it so much—maybe simply because it meant he was home. In space, there was no wet hot pressing down on you. The air in the ship was recycled to the point of staleness. And even then, it wasn't stale the way air could get stale on Earth. It wasn't clammy or stagnant, and it didn't feel like it was holding its breath. It just was. The air was nothing. It was a big loud nothing constantly reminding him he wasn't in Cuba from its pleasantness.
He also didn't notice that on Earth, every single day was a little different; every day was unique in its weather. That's not to say Lance didn't notice the weather—of course he did, he loved the weather—but there were those little changes that he missed. That even in the thick of summer, when it was hot hot hot every day and most days were that same oppressive humidity, every day had something a little special. After many thoughtless, unfilled hours spent pondering on it, he'd come to realize that with every day, the wind was a little different. And the different wind carried a slightly different scent of the ocean. And the clouds were always a little different, meaning the amount of sunlight getting through was, too. And therefore the shadows. He loved that everything seemed to run into everything else and inspire new change—and space didn't have that, either. The vacuum was constant. It was always cold and weightless. The only thing that changed was the turning heavens and the ever moving castle.
He took the ground for granted. The soil. And the sand. On Earth he loved the sand—the way it would stick and dry to his feet and warm his soles and squish when he stepped on it. But he had never stopped to truly appreciate it. The weight and drag and shape and texture it had. He never appreciated how when you walked on the wet sand near the tide, the pressure would make the whole patch around your foot dry. He never thought of sand as holding water, but it did, and so did dirt—none of the planets he visited quite did that the way Earth did. They were all rocky, or soggy, or brittle, or anything that wasn't what they were supposed to be.
All of these were just the tip of the iceberg. He could go on and on forever about how space never had the same scents—how it never smelled like salt water, or mud, or dust, or grass—and how there weren't any yellow, rickety street lamps, or creaky chairs, or even fricking pencils—he never thought he'd miss holding a pencil, and hearing it scratch against paper, and roll between his fingers—and he never would have believed he would miss going up a flight of stairs in the middle of the night, or watching his breath cloud in oddly cold mornings at the Garrison. He'd never thought he'd miss staring at his off-white ceiling in the morning while trying to convince himself to get up and go to school. He never appreciated watching his little sister do a slide tackle at a soccer game that he only half wanted to be at. He never guessed he'd miss any of these things and oh so many more.
He never thought he'd be completely without them, either. He didn't realize that his life was not piloting and the ocean and his family, but really an intricate tapestry where every single unnoticed aspect was a thread and those things just happened to be the picture. And as every single aspect of his life was changed, every single one of those threads was plucked from his tapestry. And now it was but a threadbare piece of cloth that barely had a shape at all. It was all picked to pieces and thrown billions of light years away.