So, a bit of an explanation of why this was a rough week.
I live a lot in the memories of better times, and while I’ve told a lot of stories here and elsewhere, occasionally something pops up that I’d forgotten. And it’s almost always sweet and nostalgic at least at first; however, that feeling fades to a more melancholy, hollow realization of what I don’t have anymore. And one of those is kind of what set me off this week.
So, I was browsing my feed and I got thrown a new LEGO release. I’m a sucker for the NASA line, I’ve got the ISS, the Apollo LM, the Saturn V, and Discovery, among others, populating my shelves. And they just released a model of the Hubble telescope. I saw it and immediately ordered it.
And then all of a sudden I was back in Sid’s office; we were eating Chinese food after a gaming session. It was the year they were fixing the Hubble Space Telescope. They’d discovered the Hubble telescope had an issue with its mirror; due to a manufacturing defect, it effectively had myopia, and a subsequent STS mission was going to have to fit it with a compensating lens. I made a snarky joke about it, and after a moment of silence, saw Sid just looking at me, expressionless. I swallowed. “What?”
She pointed her chopsticks at something behind me. I turned and saw a framed photo, several clean-suited figures in a large room filled with technical equipment. They were standing around a large optical instrument, and the picture was shot from above, a familiar setup showing the team that accomplished some great feat.
With a sinking feeling, I realized what was coming. “See the guy on the left?” she asked.
“Yeah.”
“That’s my dad.”
(Fortunately, I am extremely good at mea culpas. And she didn’t hold it against me.)
So that memory popping up unbidden made me smile on a dreary day, but that night I felt the loss all over again, which put me in a bit of a mood. So I sat down and did what I often do, I wrote a letter to one of my ghosts. A bit of self-therapy, unburdening myself of things I can’t say in person. And I can hope that maybe at a time like this, when the veil’s a little thin between the worlds, maybe a little bit of the love will get through.
I did get something out of it, though. Melancholy always makes me want to write, and I was digging through the scenes for Elsewhere and decided it was high time to put together a proper outline. I know how the story flows in my head, but I want to get it down in a concrete form just to make sure I know where all the pieces fit and don’t miss anything. I still have a big chunk of the story missing—I have to decide what to do with the years between the parting of my two leads and their rediscovery of one another, because the story is really only properly interesting to me when it’s the two of them. And the outline did help me fix one thing that was bugging me, an event where someone did something that I felt didn’t really fit with their character. Looking at it from a 10,000-foot altitude helped me see how it should go instead, and I’ve sorted it out.
So, writing this weekend, laying in some more supplies, and also biting the bullet and joining a remote jobs marketplace since the job thing this week seems to have fallen by the wayside.
Hope springs eternal.