It's Lonely Up Here

It's lonely up here, far away from home. Sometimes, I gaze down at that twisted planet of ours, with its lapping seas and stout mountain ranges, and become entrapped in a trance of green and blue..

Up here, the stars are alien; instead of the winking sparkles of beauty they are on Earth, here, they are haunting me, all of them, bearing down with their harsh eyes upon my back, stalking me.

I've been ambling for three days now, and its terrifying. The silence, I mean. The gloomy, perpetual silence, doomed to this place.

It's strange, really, that I find myself here, alone on this rock, so familiar to us, yet completely foreign to me. The water you gave me is almost gone, and of course, the moon's oceans dried up a long, time, ago.

So here, as I speak to you, trundling over dusty rock over rock, I am condemned. Bound to this planet like a convict with an iron ball strapped to his ankle, stumbling through this barren dust pile, painful step after step.

What is the point of going on? What is the point of anything, in all honesty? Shouldn't we all, even you down on Earth, just lie back on a dusty rock and forget about our lives while we stare far below, at something that was once at our feet, but now far, far out of reach?

Perhaps you are helping me really, exiling me to this place. Perhaps, for once in my life, I can achieve something. The prestigious accolade of becoming the first human to die on the moon, far away from home like a soldier lying face down in the mud in France.

You know, this is worse than the chair, at least that would have been over quickly. A sharp, electric bolt up my spine could have avoided the inky, stifling isolation of this place.

You told me, when you sentenced me, the conditions. Ten days of oxygen, four litres of water. So if you can hear me, it's day nine, and I want to take this chance to say, sorry. Sorry Earth. Sorry for the torment that I inflicted upon you, sorry for standing up to the oppressors, sorry, wholeheartedly for everything I have done. However, it is a great punishment, that the last thing  I will ever see is the bandaged and broken planet Earth floating below me.

Perhaps sent by the stars, I can feel something following me, something back there, hiding in the dingy darkness, hunting me. Its blotchy frame appears stark white in my mind, but when I look, there's just inky blackness.

Damn me, if I'm imagining it but there's... a second set of footprints in the dust. I don't want to know, but I do. I know what it is. I can't blame them, you know, my fears. If I was them I would also escape my dilapidated mind and hunt down the weak shell of my body, far, far away from home. At least it will be quick this way; far, far away from home.