How to Walk in Space: 3:35AM Dec 9, 2022
by Joel Peckham
My feeling was, I was a grain of sand—Alexie Leonov, first man to walk in space.
I wasn’t asleep when the light came on and you filled the doorway, it’s happened Jo, you said, oh
my God, oh my God and I don’t remember getting out of bed or walking toward you or anything
I said if I said anything what is there to say but I came to you in that hallway what do I do now.
What do I do? And I put my arms around you while yours hung heavy at your side and you
leaned toward me while pulling away as if afraid the embrace would make it real. And you
shook and language failed. Your sob, the groan a ship might make in a middle of a storm as it
takes on water and weight and started to sink, and I could not tell if we were stepping out or
in or just away or were suddenly weightless, holding on to remain
in orbit. Where flight and floating and freefall, stillness and speed are the same and the enemy
is entropy. When you start to spin and realize you can’t come out of it
The first person to walk in space was out there for only twelve minutes and he almost died,
the oxygen meant to keep him alive expanding in his suit because of the difference in pressure,
his hands pushed from his gloves, his feet from his boots until he had to open a latch from
his suit and bleed the air into space just so he could fit back through the airlock and slam the
hatch
behind him. And then there’s you, having spent how many years circling around him and the
last few trying to navigate with everything gone wrong, unable to control your flight, or trust
in gravity. You would be the first to say so much of it was
beautiful: moments even at the end, when he’d try to smile and pull you in to dance and start
to sing, and though he’s mostly rock and swing in place, hardly able to stand or move his hips,
it was like the sun coming up over edge of the world, your whole life turning beneath you. I
wonder what is more frightening: to watch someone float away or be the one
adrift. And so, I drove you down the frozen road to his body and we spoke of how you almost
felt relieved and hated yourself for that. How in those last few weeks you’d come to dread
each sundowning and how the night would come and threaten to pull you both into its
darkness. And how he kept asking to be driven home when he was sitting right there in his
living room. It’s time for me to go, he said. I can’t stay here. And nothing anyone could say could
make him believe. Even when we walked him down his own front steps and turned him
around to stare at the house he’d spent a half a century in. With you. This isn’t my home he said.
And maybe it wasn’t anymore. I guess I want
to tell you, I don’t know what heaven is but I believe
in re-entry—the cleansing burn of atmosphere. I know a little of the fear of taking that first
breath. You are not the first to have walked in space and found yourself ready to come back—
seared and shining—
to this world again.
Joel Peckham has published nine collections of poetry and nonfiction, including Bone Music (SFA) and Body Memory (New Rivers), and is co-editor of the anthology Wild Gods: The Ecstatic in American Poetry and Prose. Individual poems and essays have appeared in Prairie Schooner, The Southern Review, The Sun, and many others.
