It strikes me that you would think this was beautiful, if a bit austere. I remember when we lived by Holloman Air Force Base in New Mexico, the nights we'd trek out to the field on the lee side of the house just to watch the stars. I didn't know it at the time, but our crepuscular activities were as much about feeding my blossoming love of the stars as they were about waiting for Dad to come home. The tendency of a child's memory is to raise their mothers up; a paragon of love, serenity, and wisdom. You were an ethereal creature, gentle and lovely, but a woman too; vulnerable to the whimsy and disappointment of love. It's not until you grow older and make the same mistakes in different ways that you can understand the fallibility of your parents, the chinks in their armor that make them human. At the cost of my childhood, Dad's fallibility came to light far too soon; I eventually forgave him the self-centeredness that may have cost you considerably more. I'm not sure Dad ever reached that place, truly. But it was his burden to bear and the most I could ever have done is forgive him, as you would have done. In the last few years of his life we became close. He was somewhat of a pressure valve for me, someone trusted with whom I could talk out my real frustrations and disappointments. Someone with whom to share the triumphs and the beauty.
There was never much time to admire the scenery during the past decade. That's true for many things those ten years, as time reveals only when you're on the far side, but especially the actual landscape of space. It wasn't until I received command of the USS George Hammond (wouldn't you be so amused at Uncle George's name plastered across the hull of a spaceship) that I really had the time. If anything, there is more paperwork here than during my time at the SGC, but one of the perks to being a starship commander is the view from your desk.
That first night here, when I'd finished moving my things into my quarters and my command didn't officially begin until the next day… it was then I got my first real opportunity, after ten years of travel, to drink in the stars unhindered by missions, enemy forces, or technological quandaries. I'd been assigned a room with a small observation deck, a slight distention in the floor-to-ceiling window with a waist-high bar. If you stand with your womb to the rail, the soft ultraviolet glow of hyperspace drive caressing your curves, it almost feels as if you are suspended in the solution of the universe. Jack's commented that he finds it the most flattering light in the known cosmos. Smart-ass.
Nothing about me glitters – I almost never wear jewelry, never lacquer my nails. But there is something about that light that makes anyone who stands in it glow. My memory of your beauty is augmented by the thought of you standing in this crisp phosphorescence. The gentle rending of atoms around the ship would lick at your honey hair and make your eyes a bright, forget-me-not blue. Periwinkle-white light would ripple over your soft profile as you let yourself drift among the stars, much like I do now. The idea of floating weightless without a concern for the living world is both terrifying and magnetic. I've had my fair share of EVAs. There have been times when I had nothing but to reconcile myself to a raw, bare death hung out against the thick, infinitely deep velvet blanket of space. Drifting, but never able to touch the fabric, never able to feel warm again though I was completely enveloped. I could feel you there too.
In the quiet moments before I fall asleep, I have only the milky refulgence as company. In this glazed timescape you would sit by my bedside, you, me and the fairy light, talking about the things we never did. The last thing I would see before the caliginous tendrils of sleep cradled me down would be your smile frosted by the starlight. These half-visions are one of the times I feel most at peace. The constellations are different, but the intermittent times when the ship is not in motion, we hang. The room is just a little bit darker, and in a comfortable chair I can believe for a moment I'm lying in the parched grass in New Mexico. The arid desert air sweeping off the flats tickled the waves of your tawny hair and swirled your devotion around us, stroking in the gentle cadence of your breath. We counted the stars, then, when time had no limit, just like your love. These stars are the seconds we had. Some fading from immediacy with the errancy of memory, but ever stretching onto the continuously delayed dawn that never comes to this place. One day, I'll watch the sun rise.