A Peculiar Dream
Occasionally, I am away from home. When away, I see beyond the previous walls that surround me: conventions, expectations, and my daily can of worms.
From 5 billion kilometers away, I look at our world and it is just a pale blue dot. Jupiter looks like an orange and Earth looks like a dried blueberry.
I tilt my head a little and guess what I see? Solar sails. From such a distance, the light sails resemble leaves falling off a tree. Parched crisps enshrouded in the darkness moving towards the light.
Up there you realize the obvious connection between the large and the tiny. Today, I did not go too far. Just about 550 km above Earth’s atmosphere.
Even though I have seen galaxies and stars, the Hubble Space telescope is by far the most beguiling. It is like a giant version of the one I made at summer camp this year. It has these gyroscopes and an aluminum baffle that shines like a light azore.
I touched the electrical box Kathryn Thornton put into the telescope on the repair mission. I felt like I was touching the metallic sheen of an Akhal-Teke.
For 17 years, I have felt sweat drip down my back in summers and I have felt the glacial cold of winters turn my feet to stone. When all your life you have been sensible of so much, you can feel the nothingness even more.
My arms free in the nothingness make me look like a wacky waving tube man. The whole world under my feet looks like a bowling bowl with finely carved marble designs on it.
I was just there admiring the universe at its best when I felt a buzz in my head. I knew that it was time to go back home. This buzz raises the contrast of my surroundings.
The planets start moving up and down like Acacia koaia on a black trampoline. Something from behind starts pulling me right from the last bone of my spine.
I accelerate backward into a fissure like an elbow macaroni in the sea pulled up by a fishing rod and BAM.
My head hits my bed. With half-open eyes, I reach for my alarm clock, but it turns out that it, is in the hands of a bigger alarm clock. The natural one, my mother.
“Another one of your dreams?”
“Yes, one of those good ones.”
By: Alishba Zahid