shades-of-earth

I__e heard that when you__e in a life-or-death situation, like a car accident or a gunfight, all your senses shoot up to almost superhuman level, everything slows down, and you__e hyper-aware of what__ happening around you.As the shuttle careens toward the earth, the exact opposite is true for me.Everything silences, even the screams and shouts from the people on the other side of the metal door, the crashes that I pray aren__ bodies, the hissing of rockets, Elder__ cursing, my pounding heartbeat.I feel nothing__ot the seat belt biting into my flesh, not my clenching jaw, nothing. My whole body is numb.Scent and taste disappear.The only thing about my body that works is my eyes,and they are filled with the image before them. The ground seems to leap up at us as we hurtle toward it. Through the blurry image of the world below us, I see the outline of land__ continent. And at once, my heart lurches with the desire to know this world, to make it our home. My eyes drink up the image of the planet__nd my stomach sinks with the knowledge that this is a coastline I__e never seen before. I could spin a globe of Earth around and still be able to recognize the way Spain and Portugal reach into the Atlantic, the curve of the Gulf of Mexico, the pointy end of India. But this continent__t dips and curves in ways I don__ recognize, swirls into an unknown sea, creating peninsulas in shapes I do not know, scattering out islands in a pattern I cannot connect.And it__ not until I see this that I realize: this world may one day become our home,but it will never be the home I left behind.

And I know what I told my father was true: let us taste the world, and we__l do whatever it takes to shape it into our home.

What you really want to know,_ I say, __s how to make sure we all don__ just rip each other apart, right?_ The fight earlier is way too fresh in our minds. We are a powder keg; just a spark will blow us apart.

I would use the same word to describe both my joy and the rain: torrential. This__his__his is all I ever wanted from the world: wide-open spaces and cooling rain and the chance to run.

The dark sky.A hundred million stars.More stars than I__e ever seen before. My eyes let me see farther, but they don__ show me the one thing I want to see. I would trade all the stars in the universe if I could just have him back again.Wind whistles through the trees nearby. Birdsong weaves in and out of the sound.The hybrids emerge from the communication building, heads tilted to the sky.And then we see the end.Godspeed__ engine was nuclear; who knows what fueled the biological weapons. But they explode together. In space, they don__ make the familiar mushroom cloud. They don__ make the boom! of an exploding bomb.There is, against the dark sky, a brief flash of light. It is filled with colors, like a nebula or the aurora borealis, bursting like a popped bubble.Nothing else__o sound of an explosion, no tremors in the earth, no smell of smoke. Not here, on the surface of the planet.Nothing else to signify Elder__ death.Just light.And then it__ gone.And then he__ gone.

What else can you tell me?_ Dad stares at me. __hat have you learned while you were awake?__ learned that life is so, so fragile. I learned that you can know someone for just days and never forget the impression he left on you. I learned that art can be beautiful and sad at the same time. I learned that if someone loves you, he__l wait for you to love him back. I learned that how much you want something doesn__ determine whether you get it or not, that __o_ might not be enough, that life isn__ fair, that my parents can__ save me, that maybe no one can. __othing much,_ I mutter.