Hi Book Lovers!
Today’s post is a little late due to some technical difficulties. It’s also a little longer than usual. Instead of a haiku comic, I’m sharing an illustrated prose poem (or perhaps it’s a short story) that first appeared in my book, Quantum Joy Infinite Melancholy.
I’m slowly expanding the kind of work I create and share. But never fear; tomorrow, the haiku comics will return! Those will always be the core of my work.
To make your reading experience a little easier, below each image, you will also find the plain text from the story.
I wish we had remained strangers to the Moon.
I used to love the Moon. As a child, I thought it was a giant night light in the sky.
Its beams pierced my bedroom window and chased away my nightmares.
Before we were married, when we were still in love but not together,
I spent a few years on the other side of the world, and each night I’d look up at the Moon knowing when I woke up the next morning, you’d be staring at the same Moon.
One day after we’d been married long enough to have two kids, I said I loved you. And you didn’t say anything. Not for an eternity —
or maybe it was a minute. It could’ve been five minutes or five years. I’ve no way of knowing. You stared at me, anger and pain flashing in your eyes.
I met your stare as best as I could while my guts melted. You whispered that you didn’t love me and walked out the door with those two kids.
There was no moon that night.
I needed space to think and a place where I could become a new person. The colony was fresh then.
The ad online said they needed people like me. I signed up. It was true — they needed me. They needed bodies with broken spirits.
There’s a casino here.
But the real high-stakes gambling takes place in the mines. Just like the casino, in the mines, the house always wins.
I hate the Moon. The dust gets in everything. The fine-grained lunar sand cuts your skin when it gets in the collar of your pressure suit.
Everything looks the same. It’s like living in the world’s most boring black-and-white silent movie.
I’m the crew chief for the second shift at the mine. That just means I’ve managed to live longer than all the other shattered souls I signed on with.
I’m eight months away now. Eight months away from having enough money to buy my way back home.
I keep that quiet. Bad things happen to people who get close to the return trip.
Hollie’s helmet mysteriously cracked on her penultimate shift before she was supposed to get on the shuttle home.
Dax died in their sleep three months before their accounts were clear. Zhang never came back from the commissary one night.
I know they’re watching me, checking my accounts. I have ways to stash money.
I make sure to go to the garish, glowing monstrosity of a casino every day and make a big show of plunking lunar bucks into the goddamn slot machines.
That’s why the casino’s here — to give us a place to dull the edge of our misery long enough that we forget we hate it here.
That we hate ourselves.
The casino is a place to make sure that the miners and their money never leave the Moon.
My crew thinks I go to the casino because I’m like them. The company thinks I go to the casino because I’m a model employee — lonely and hopeless.
Everyone is half right.
I go to the casino every day because right at the end of the second shift the Earth rises over the horizon. It’s the only natural, non-neon color out here.
I love Earth.
It’s like a beacon of hope in the sky just for me. I imagine its sole purpose is to make the lunar sky less scary. Sometimes when I look at the Earth on my way to the casino, I hear my children calling for me to come home.
I’m eight months away from returning.
I don’t want any more space.
There’s nothing new about me, I’ve aged two decades in the past three years.
I’m old and broken. What I want more than anything in the solar system is to be smothered by my children again, and to see your face.
I want to tell you one more time that I love you.
You don’t even have to say anything back.
Click here to learn more about Quantum Joy Infinite Melancholy.
Be the weird you want to see in the world!
Cheers,
Jason