Red Vines

Give or take, they tell me Saturn is roughly 886 million miles from Earth.

Give or take, they tell me Iapetus is roughly two million, two hundred twelve thousand, six hundred and ten miles from Saturn.

So, on a good day, when Saturn and Earth are on opposite sides of the Sun, and Iapetus is on the Neptune side of Saturn, it's a fair bet to say I am over a billion miles from Earth.

But not the Earth in my head.

No. That remains terrifyingly and constantly close. They try to tell me black holes have commanding gravitational wells, but no gravitational well is deeper than that of the singularity in my head.

And aye, there be terrors there. Far worse than the choking almond smell of the leaky refuges I've blasted out of Iapetus' crust and mountains. Far worse than the funk of the space suits I use regularly when the memories of one refuge become overwhelming and I have to flee to the gravitational hell of another.

My therapist says I shouldn't write when I'm in such a mood. But I have to write something. That well is always seeking new information, new experiences it can dredge up and torment me with later on.

Oh, there are some beauties.

But I don't wish to dwell.

Dwell. That's a funny word. Dwell dwell dwell. It's like an echo. Or the sound of a slightly flat ball bouncing. Or of rabbits kissing, if memory serves.

If memory serves.

At the Alamo, ironically, is where I remember the least. But I spend little time there, maybe a few weeks a year, for fear that the memories will reach escape velocity and nest in the friable walls and leave no place on Iapetus free of Earth-shine. Only to settle in again. Again. To dwell.

There are a few things I miss. Conditionallly.

Dogs, I miss dogs. Not when they want to go to bed or need to go outside and bug me about both, mooking somewhere in the corner when I'm trying to get something else done. But I miss the *idea* of dogs, who like to run and bark and sniff and do the things that dogs do besides the mooking.

And the feel of sunshine. Oh, there's sunshine. But it's like Thursday. Out here, it has no feel.

Red licorice, I miss. It's extremely hard to come by in my corner of the solar system. I'm lucky enough to get fresh water that's not laced with the resident cyanide. So I try not to complain.

But I would kill for a theater box of Red Vines.